My Grammar and I [antikvár]

J Mj Grammar I Introduction: a very brief history of English grammar 'pt is] impossible at the present juncture to teach English grammar in the schools for the simple reason that no one knows exactly what it is.' Government report, 1921 Anyone who has so much as run their eye over an Anglo-Saxon lament, a tale by Chaucer or a play by Shakespeare will see that the English in which they are written is very different from the way we write and speak today Even a novel written as little as fifty years ago may differ from a modern one in style, vocabulary and punctuation. The books of poor old Enid Blyton, most of which were written in the 1940s and 1950s, have already had to be revised for modern children because they were considered so out of touch - and not least because she had a propensity for naming her characters Fanny, Dick and so on. It is in the nature of a living language to evolve, as new inventions require new words, foreign influences enliven the vocabulary and social changes give people more or less leisure to write at length. The monks who copied out medieval texts invented short forms to save themselves time, which passed into the language as ligatures in words such as, funnily enough, mediaval, which we now deem archaic. In our own time the great revolutions have occurred because of emailing and texting, and who knows: a standard dictionary of 2028 may well contain the word gr8.