Paper 6        Linguistics

Linguistics vs Traditional Grammar

Traditional grammarians, on the other hand, have tended to emphasize, perhaps overemphasized, the importance of writing, because of its continuation. Before the invention of sound recording, it was difficult for people to cope with the words that exist only for seconds. People were encouraged to imitate best book for using the language. Many of the applications of traditional grammar rules only relate to written language;. They may not be significant in terms of spoken language without much qualification and more addition. The modern linguistics is completely different from traditional view of language. It does not apply Latin framework. It is true Latin has been the great influential language during the European regime. And it was considered as global framework of all the languages. That is why many languages other languages ​​have been forced to conform to Latin styles and categories, especially the cause of division in the past tense system, present and future linguists. Modern linguistics rejects judgment on one language to other. They see language as the idea that any language can provide the basis for all other language. They are generating the ways to put universal framework by finding out common features among most of language used by people.

The Differences between Modern Linguistics and Traditional Grammar

Linguistics is descriptive not prescriptive. Most modern linguistics is descriptive, because it attempts to describe what people actually say, not what people should say. It describes language in all its aspects, but does not prescribe rules of ‘correctness’. This is in contrast with the study of language in previous centuries. It was mostly prescriptive. Traditional grammars told people how to use a language. Modern linguists, however, do not believe that there is an absolute standard of correctness concerning language use which linguists or school teachers should view as their duty to maintain. Instead, they would prefer to be observers and recorders of facts, but not judges. They believe that whatever occurs in natural speech ( hesitation, incomplete utterance, misunderstanding, etc. ) should be describe in their analysis. They might recognize that one type of speech appears to be more socially acceptable than others because of the influence of fashion. But this will not make them think that socially acceptable variety can replace all the other varieties, or the old words are always better than new ones or vice visa. They will regard the changes in language and language uses as the result of a natural and continuous precess, but not something to be feared. Language changes should be observed and described. However, this does not deny that languages have rules. They obviously do or we would not understand each other. On the other hand, no single rule or expression is necessarily there forever.

Linguistics regards the spoken language as primary, not the written. In the past, grammarians have overstressed the importance o f the written word, partly because of its permanence. It was difficult to cope with fleeting utterances before the invention of sound recording. The traditional classical education was also partly to blame. People insisted on molding language in accordance with the usage of the ‘best authors’ of classical times and these authors existed only in written form. As a matter of fact, however, whether we think of the history of human speech in general of if the linguistic experience of the individual speaker, spoken language is the primary phenomenon, and writing is only a more or less imperfect reflection of it. We all learn to understand speech before we learn to read, and to speak before we learn to write. We all hear more language than we read and speak a great deal more than we write. Spoken language is ordinarily more flexible tan written language; it leads the way in linguistic development, while written language follows at a greater or less interval. Spoken language is considered as the primary medium for several reasons. Spoken language is prior to written language historically. In other words, it existed long, long before written systems came into being. Even today many well-developed languages do not have a written system yet.

Genetically, children always learn to speak before they learn to write. Blind children have no difficulty in learning to speak but deaf children have great difficulty in learning to read. This shows that the channel of sight is not as important as the channel of sound in learning a language. However, this is not to deny the importance of written language, which has its own advantages that spoken language does not have. First, with written language, messages can be carried through space. Human voice is effective only within earshot. With the help of written language, we can send and receive messages across vast spaces. Secondly, with written language, messages can be carried through time. The spoken word ‘dies’ immediately, but a written message can be transmitted far beyond the moment of production ----- often from generation to generation and from one culture to another. Thirdly, oral message are subject to distortion, either unintentional (when due to misunderstanding for example) or otherwise. Written messages, on the other hand, remain exactly the same whether read a thousand years later or ten thousand miles away. Spoken utterances share many common features with written sentences, but they also exhibit considerable differences. Therefore linguists believe spoken forms and written forms belong to different systems though they may overlap. The systems must be analyzed separately: the spoken first, then the written.

Linguistics differs from traditional grammar in that it does not force languages into a Latin-based framework. In the past, many traditional textbooks have assumed unquestionably that Latin provides a universal framework into which all languages fit, and countless school children have been confused by meaningless attempts to force English into foreign patterns. It is sometimes claimed, for example, that a phrase such as for John is in the ‘dative case’. But this is blatantly untrue, since English does not have a Latin-type case system. At other times, the influence of the Latin framework is more subtle, and so more misleading. Many people have wrongly come to regard certain Latin categories as being ‘natural’ ones. For example, it is commonly assumed that the Latin tense divisions of past, present and future are inevitable. Yet one frequently meets languages which do not make this neat threefold distinction. In some languages, it is more important to express the duration of an action ------ whether it is a single act or a continuing process than to locate the action in time.

In addition, judgments on certain constructions often turn out to have a Latin origin. For example, people frequently argue that ‘good English’ avoids ‘split infinitives’ as in the phrase to humbly apologize, where the infinitive to apologize is ‘split’ by humbly. The idea that a split infinitive is wrong is based on Latin. Purists insist that, because a Latin infinitive is only one word, its English equivalent must be as near to one word as possible. To linguists, it is unthinkable to judge one language by the standards of another. They are opposed to the notion that any one language can provide an adequate framework for all the others. They are trying to set up a universal framework, but that will be based on the features shared by most of the languages used by mankind.

Summary

Although there are great differences between Modern linguistic and Traditional grammar, much of the work done descriptively, rather than prescriptively, in contemporary grammatical analysis was couched in Traditional grammar language by scholar like Otto Jespersen, W. Nelson Francis and Henrik Poutsma. To understand any of the modern grammars, and to understand virtually all discussion about writing or literature at the level of stylistic analysis, one must have an understanding of the terminology drawn from Traditional grammar, if not of the whole system.