Traditional Grammar PDF

Traditional Grammar It is linguistics which concerned with or laying down rules of usage.i.e. the grammarian's task was to formulate rules about how people should speak and write language according to some principles or standards laid down by scholars whose authority on the subject was unqu...

Traditional Grammar It is linguistics which concerned with or laying down rules of usage.i.e. the grammarian's task was to formulate rules about how people should speak and write language according to some principles or standards laid down by scholars whose authority on the subject was unquestioned. They were not interested in how people actually spoke and wrote, but in the correctness of their language. The proper usage was the type of grammar adopted with a focus on the selection of best forms even if the latter are prescribed from another language and not from the real usage. Thus, prscriptivism is one of the major characteristics of traditional grammar. In linguistics, Traditional grammar is a theory that includes a collection of prescriptive rules and concepts about the structure of language based on ideas of western society inherited from ancient Greek and Roman sources. The term is mainly used to distinguish these ideas from those of contemporary linguistics. In the English-Speaking world at least, traditional grammar is still widely taught in elementary schools. Traditional grammar is not a unified theory that attempts to explain the structure of all languages with a unique set of concepts (as in the aim of linguistics); there are, however, different traditions for different languages, each with its own traditional vocabulary and analysis. In the case of European languages, each of them represents an adaptation of Latin grammar to a particular language. The dominating view at that time was that Latin has more appropriate forms than languages such as English and French, and thus they should take these forms as they are better. 2.Historical Overview Traditional grammar can be traced back over 2,000 years and includes grammars from the classical period of Greece, India, and Rome; the Middle Ages; the Renaissance; the eighteenth and nineteenth century; and more modern times. The grammars created in this tradition reflect the prescriptive view that one dialect or variety of a language is to be valued more highly than others and should be the norm for all speakers of the language. Traditional grammars include prescriptive rules that are to be followed and proscriptive rules of usage to be avoided. ‘When describing an emotion, use of an English word descended from Latin is preferred over an Anglo-Saxon word’ is an example of a prescriptive rule, and ‘Never split an infinitive’ is an example of a proscriptive rule. The analytical study of language began around 500 BC in Greece and India. The work of Greek scholar Dionysius Thrax is the model for all grammars of European languages that follow. His He¯ grammátike¯ tékhne¯ (c. 100 BC; The Art of Letters) was the first widely recognized text to provide a curriculum for learning proper Greek. His lessons included an introduction to the alphabet, lessons on how to join syllables together properly, and instruction in the appreciation of word arrangement (syntax). To Thrax, grammar was the technical knowledge necessary to produce the prestige language of poets, orators, and writers. Around the same time, the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro produced the 25 volumes of his De lingua latina (c. 100, About the Latin Language). Varro contrasted Latin with Greek, changed Greek grammatical terms into Latin, and formed his grammar of Latin by adapting Greek rules. Other Latin grammars, influenced by the works of Thrax and Varro, were produced in the Middle Ages. Aelius Donatus published Ars Grammatica (c. fourth century, Art of Letters), and Donat Priscianus Caesariensis (Priscian) wrote Institutiones grammaticae(c. sixth century, Grammatical Foundations), which is the only complete surviving Latin grammar. As printing became more widely available in the Renaissance, European grammarians began the mass production of grammars of their languages by mirroring the Latin grammars of Varro, Donatus, and that the grammatical descriptions of Latin could be routinely applied to their own languages; this perception, however, was not accurate and resulted in many artificial prescriptive and proscriptive rules. Many of these false assumptions still carry over to attitudes about English today. Continuing with this tradition, grammarians in the eighteenth century studied English, along with many other European languages, by using the prescriptive approach in traditional grammar; during this time alone, over 270 grammars of English were published. During most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, grammar was viewed as the art or science of correct language in both speech and writing. By pointing out common mistakes in usage, these early grammarians created grammars and dictionaries to help settle usage arguments and to encourage the improvement of English. One of the most influential grammars of the eighteenth century was Lindley Murray’s English grammar (1794), which was updated in new editions for decades. Murray’s rules were taught for many years throughout school systems in England and the United States and helped to create modern attitudes about the existence of a correct or standard variety of English. Murray’s grammar represents a practice that continued to develop throughout the nineteenth century and was still dominant in the 1960s when linguistics began to focus more on generative and transformational grammar due to Noam Chomsky’s groundbreaking and influential ideas. Even though linguists today view traditional grammar as an unscientific way to study language and grammar, many of the basic Latin- based notions of grammar can still be found in all levels of the classroom and in textbooks and usage guides available to educators and the public. Traditional grammar books usually provide lists of grammatical terms, definitions of those terms, and advice on using so-called ‘standard’ grammar, including suggested correct usage of punctuation, spelling, and word choice. This advice is usually based on the prescriptive rules of prestige varieties of English, varieties often only able to be used by those in power either economically or politically. 3. Characteristics of Traditional Grammar Traditional grammar did not study language for its own sake, as a complex and highly-organized system of communication. Rather, it studied language in relation to disciplines like logic, philosophy, literary criticism, religion, history, and language teaching. This lack of interest in language itself resulted in partial descriptions of language; certain phenomena were studied in so far as they were crucial for the understanding of a problem in religion or philosophy, for example. Traditional grammar was biased against the spoken medium (spoken language). Features of the latter were assumed to be similar to those of the written language; consequently, the rules of the written from were wrongly imposed onto speech. At time, the speech forms were totally ignored only because they were very different from the written data which were the concern of traditional grammars. For example, the regular plural of nouns in English, according to traditional approaches, is formed by adding "s" or an "es" to a singular noun (e.g.' radios' vs 'tomatoes'). Nonetheless, the rule does not hold for the spoken language where this "s" is pronounced as [s] (as in "hats"), [z] (as in 'dogs') and [IZ] (as in "churches "), depending on the nature of the sound which precedes it. These distinct pronunciations are accounted for by means of simple rules which traditional grammar neglected. Traditional grammar put its major focus on grammar more than any other components of language like meaning. It concerned itself with the pronunciation patterns of language, e.g., stress and rhythm since they are needed for the explanation of speech-correction. This is largely due to the fact that traditional grammarians were not fully aware of the big difference between the spoken language and the written one. Latin itself was taught as a written language, and consequently the intellectuals from different countries were unable to understand each other's spoken Latin after the sixteenth century. Traditional grammarians dealt with language mainly from the diachronic point of view. They did not obey the distinction made between diachronic and synchronic study of language. For example, they used a comparative philology, i.e., they would study a specific state of Greek or Latin with the reference to historical consideration. Traditional grammar also dealt with the etymology of words, i.e., the study of the origin of words and their historical development. This kind of study was practiced by Greek philosophers in the fifth century. Although traditional grammar made some misconceptions about language, it has contributed largely to the development of modern Linguistics, many concepts like: verb, noun, sentence, syllable, letter, and stem come from traditional grammar. It had also provided description of language in terms of grammatical categories such as gender, person, voice and tense.