This is one of many writings, based on my experience as a language teacher, language learner and student of linguistics, that I have been working on for a long time now. Since just this one text is already growing to gargantuan proportions (as befits the breadth and depth and controversial nature of the issues involved), I am breaking it up into six more manageable and hopefully more readable sections, which I hope to post fairly regularly over the coming weeks.

Introduction

Verbs are often a source of much anxiety and difficulty for language learners. The array of forms, endings, auxiliaries, tenses, aspects, moods, not to mention the frequent irregularities, and the complex, often overlapping and ambiguous, ways in which they map onto reality, seem to pose a daunting obstacle to mastery of a foreign tongue.

Things, however, may not be quite as complex as they are frequently made to appear by teachers and grammar books. I shall suggest here six reasons why learners need be less wary of verbs than they usually are and why teachers should rethink the way they introduce them.

• The Ghost of Latin

Latin is no longer routinely taught in schools. We have long since abandoned the long-held belief that the prescriptions of Roman rhetoricians regarding the erudite use of their own language are universally applicable. Most English teachers would, therefore, vigorously refute any suggestion that their teaching methodology bears any resemblance whatsoever to how Latin was taught in the past.

The shadow of Latin, however, still hangs heavily over language teaching, even in the English-speaking world. Although archaisms such as the subjunctive have now fallen out of fashion, we still regularly talk about tenses, infinitives, nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, present, past and perfect, and we still tabulate verbs in the form of conjugations. None of these concepts—or descriptive techniques, as I would prefer to call them—while applicable to some extent to Latin and neo-Latin languages—are especially well-suited to a description of modern English.

Words in English are, for instance, not clearly divided up into nouns, verbs and adjectives. Many—even those of Latin origin—are (or have the potential to be) employed for any or all of these functions. Consider the word ‘partition’ in the following three sentences, taken at random from recent texts published on the Internet:

• The Syrian regime is preparing for partition of the country (function = noun)

• In DOS systems, you can partition a disk (function = verb)

• A partition wall is a wall that divides a room (function = adjective)

The concept of ‘tense’ is another case where descriptive Latin forms do not apply well to English. Latin has forms that clearly refer to the past (perfect or imperfect), the present, and the future, to which the concept of tense or ‘time’ can aptly be applied. In Modern English, however, the Present Simple does not refer to the present moment, the Present Continuous can be used to refer to the future, the past can be referred to using either the Past Simple or the Present Perfect ‘tense’ (the latter being, as the name suggests, a present tense). Furthermore, most distinctions (especially those regarding various degrees of speculation about the future) are made by way of the use of auxiliary verbs and other devices rather than endings and conjugations.

Confused? You should be. The last paragraph sounds complicated, not because the English verb system itself is, but because I (like many others before me) am trying to explain the structure of the English language using Latin concepts and terms.

English verbs, in fact only have three endings –ed (pronounced in three distinct ways) to indicate the Past Simple or the adjectival form of the verb, -s (again pronounced in three distinct ways) to mark a Present Simple verb whose subject is a 3^rd person singular, and –ing to transform a verb into an adjective or a noun and, by extension, indicate continuity of action.

Of these only –ed and –ing mark genuinely important distinctions and, for this reason, -s is omitted in many dialects. It is in fact quite possible to communicate effectively, if imperfectly, without using any of these endings—a feature of many pidgins based on English.

English verbs can, therefore, be understood and applied in practice using a very narrow range of endings. There are no conjugations; and the language is perfectly serviceable without using any of the suffixes that currently persist.

Thomas de Quincy, in his early-19^th century autobiography, bemoans the fact that English was not, at that time, taught in schools. Students were drilled in the classical languages to the point where, as de Quincy puts it, he could easily ‘harangue a mob in Attic Greek’, but were unschooled in the subtleties and beauties of Shakespeare, Milton and Keats, still less the various dialects spoken by ordinary people across the British Isles and its present and former colonies.

When English did come to be taught in English schools, it was overlaid with a cumbersome template of Greco-Roman grammar and rhetoric and a certain snobbery privileging the somewhat strained and bizarre version of the native tongue spoken by the aristocracy and aspired to by the middle classes.

This fuss about language was just one feature of a larger picture of promoting upper-class or increasingly upper-middle-class values and demeaning those of others. Dickens’s Hard Times begins with the principal of a ‘model’ school—Mr. Gradgrind—berating a working-class student over her preferences in wallpaper and carpet patterns. She likes horses and flowers; the teacher mocks her lack of taste and promotes geometric abstraction instead. “You must use… for these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colors) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration… This is fact. This is taste.”

The ghostly conjugations and rhetorical terminology that still linger in contemporary language learning in many ways resemble Mr. Gradgrind’s ‘figures… susceptible of proof and demonstration.’ They purpose to ground language in the universal authority of facts, while, at the same time, imposing a certain narrowly elitist view of manners, method and style. However, this ghost of Latin, I shall argue in the coming posts in this series, reflects neither the facts of the English language nor common-sense and ‘good taste’.

Bibliography

(sources quoted directly in this section [†]and studies that inform the text as a whole[*])

Bybee, Joan et al. (1994) [*] The Evolution of Grammar. Tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world. University of Chicago Press.

De Quincey, Thomas (1997) [†] Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Penguin Popular Classics. (first published 1821-22).

Dickens, Charles (1994) [†] Hard Times. Penguin Popular Classics. (first published 1854)

Lewis, Michael (2002) [*] The Lexical Approach. The State of ELT and a way forward. Thomson/Heinle. (first published 1993).