# Latin influencing English grammar prescription



## Dymn

I have heard more than once that historically prescription of English grammar was based on Latin, and prescriptivists used Latin grammar to draw parallelisms and back up their "arguments". Is this claim true? Could you provide some examples about this? The constructions they supported were entirely artificial or had some grounding in the spoken language?


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## Hulalessar

The claim is true.

The old grammarians (presumably) believed that the grammar of Latin was something approaching an ideal grammar. Rather than examining English and extracting rules from their analysis, they described English in terms of Latin grammar. Whilst English and Latin are different they are sufficiently similar that (after a little banging) it is not difficult to persuade yourself, if Latin grammar is the only grammar you know, that it all works out quite nicely. Whilst the grammarians did not go so far as to change the essential nature of English, where they could or it took their fancy they imposed some Latin rules on English. The most cited examples, still followed by some, are that a sentence should not end in a preposition and that the infinitive should not be split. Their influence, though diminished, is by no means dead.


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## apmoy70

Hulalessar said:


> The claim is true.
> 
> The old grammarians (presumably) believed that the grammar of Latin was something approaching an ideal grammar. Rather than examining English and extracting rules from their analysis, they described English in terms of Latin grammar. Whilst English and Latin are different they are sufficiently similar that (after a little banging) it is not difficult to persuade yourself, if Latin grammar is the only grammar you know, that it all works out quite nicely. Whilst the grammarians did not go so far as to change the essential nature of English, where they could or it took their fancy they imposed some Latin rules on English. The most cited examples, still followed by some, are that a sentence should not end in a preposition and that *the infinitive should not be split*. Their influence, though diminished, is by no means dead.


But how could this be a Latinism? How can one avoid "splitting" the Latin infinitive?
The Latin infinitive is a single word while the English one needs the particle _to_ before the verb, as marker of the infinitive


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## Hulalessar

apmoy70 said:


> But how could this be a Latinism? How can one avoid "splitting" the Latin infinitive?
> The Latin infinitive is a single word while the English one needs the particle _to_ before the verb, as marker of the infinitive



That is precisely the point! The Latin infinitive cannot be split because it is a single word. Today some may argue that "to" is not really part of the infinitive. It is just that when translating infinitives from other languages it is required more often than not and may be felt to attach itself to the verb, but it no more does that than "the" attaches itself to a noun. The rule was therefore imposed without any proper justification, but it is still the case today that some consider splitting the infinitive ungrammatical. Many who consider it perfectly acceptable will nevertheless sometimes avoid doing it so as not to be thought illiterate.


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## gburtonio

Personally I've never actually come across any evidence for the supposed Latin influence underlying the split infinitive 'rule'. It doesn't seem so different to me from many other stylistic recommendations you come across in traditional grammars and style guides, such as only using 'which' in non-restrictive relative clauses, or not using 'less' with plural nouns. The idea of an influence from Latin grammar would also be more compelling if infinitives in Latin were made up of two words, which could never be split. However, as apmoy70 says, that isn't the case.

Certainly, traditional descriptions of Latin grammar have had a big role in descriptions of English. The first grammarians of English (the first grammar of English is considered to be Bullokar's publication in the 16th century) had the choice of either coming up with a totally new system of analysis for the language, or of basing their descriptions on existing systems; they chose the latter, adapting descriptions of Latin, (Ancient) Greek, and Hebrew as best they could to English. This is why the majority of the terminology we use to describe English grammar is of Latin and Greek origin. Another factor was that there was for a period a belief that all languages, or at least all European languages, were somehow universal in structure, so providing an account of a previously undescribed language like English was primarily a case of searching for the equivalents in English of the Latin parts of speech, tenses, structures etc. A final factor was the role of Latin as a lingua franca in the period when early English grammars were written. Writers assumed that their readership would know Latin, so often provided Latin translations of examples of English given. In fact, many early English grammars were written entirely in Latin.

But it's a mistake to think of traditional grammars of English as making up some kind of monolithic entity. Different writers have believed different things, and have been prescriptivist to a lesser or greater extent. The classical influence is very strong in descriptions of case – there's a table in one 18th century grammar showing the adjective 'wise' being 'conjugated' in singular, plural and in three genders across six cases (nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative). Of course, the adjective doesn't change, so the table is extremely surreal. But elsewhere you find authors making the case for English's individuality, complaining against previous writers' efforts to link every English tense to a Latin one, or to find English equivalents of different cases, voices etc. in Latin. The majority of grammarians didn't assume that English grammar should follow the rules of Latin – it's just that they were using Latin as a framework to describe English, and this inevitably led to problems.


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## Hulalessar

gburtonio said:


> The majority of grammarians didn't assume that English grammar should follow the rules of Latin – it's just that they were using Latin as a framework to describe English, and this inevitably led to problems.



That sums the position up admirably.


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## Cenzontle

> The most cited examples,...


I thought you were going to mention "It is I", putting the predicate nominative pronoun in the nominative, instead of the more "natural" _It's me._


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## Hulalessar

Cenzontle said:


> I thought you were going to mention "It is I", putting the predicate nominative pronoun in the nominative, instead of the more "natural" _It's me._



Not sure about that one. It seems likely to have been influenced by the rule of Latin grammar that the compliment of the verb "to be" must be in the nominative case.

I am not sure exactly what "it is I" was in Latin, but I am more than moderately confident it was not "est ego" (which is literally "(it) is I") because that would imply that something other than me was me. I suspect the Romans said either one or both of "sum ego" or "ego sum" which is "I am I" and not "(it) is I/me". Whilst not conclusive as to what the Latin is, Spanish has "soy yo" and Italian "sono io" which follow the principle that the subject (even if unexpressed) and compliment of a copula being equivalent they have to be in the same person with the verb agreeing accordingly.


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## Rallino

Might it have to do with the French _c'est moi_?


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## Hulalessar

Rallino said:


> Might it have to do with the French _c'est moi_?



Since French has been brought into it I looked up "disjunctive pronoun" in Wikipedia. The article states that "It is I" drives from Middle English "It am I" where (presumably) "it" is the compliment, i.e. is equivalent to Modern English "I am it". With the fixing of modern word order the "it" was felt to be the subject and so the verb changed to "is". So it seems that the grammarians who argued that "me" was wrong ought to have been arguing that "is" was wrong as well.


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## Rallino

Well that makes more sense. German also has _das_ _bin ich._


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> Not sure about that one. It seems likely to have been influenced by the rule of Latin grammar that the compliment of the verb "to be" must be in the nominative case.


You are assuming that_ it is me_ is native English and _it is I_ a grammarians' superimposition on the "natural" English grammar. In fact it's the opposite. The tendency to replace nominative by objective case prepositions (e.g. saying_ you are_ rather than _ye are_) is a consequence of the decay of the original five case system and didn't occur before early modern English. Give English a bit more time and _me_ in the subject position  (which today is marked as strongly dialectal) will sound perfectly natural.


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## Nino83

Hulalessar said:


> compl*i*ment


_compl*e*ment_ 


Rallino said:


> Might it have to do with the French _c'est moi_? German also has _das_ _bin ich._


It could be so. In Gallo-Italian languages (like Piedmontese, Lombard, Ligurian, Emiliano-Romagnolo) the Latin accusative pronouns were used as subject pronouns (when one has to stress, highlight the subject), while the old nominative pronouns have become simple verbal prefixes (or mandatory clitics), like in French. Double subject pronouns (strong subject pronoun + clitic subject pronoun) are common in colloquial French and in Gallo-Italian languages.

Mi i parl (Piedmontese), Moi je parle (French) => i, je < ego; mi, moi < me
Io parlo (Italian), Yo hablo (Spanish) => io, yo < ego
C'est moi qui (French) vs. Sono io che (Italian)

So probably in the _c'est moi_ construction the use of the third neuter pronoun _ce_ comes from Frankish (Germanic dummy subject pronouns) and the use of the old Latin accusative pronoun _moi_ in subject position is a Gallic innovation.


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## bibax

Hulalessar said:


> The Latin infinitive cannot be split because it is a single word.


Strictly, the Latin infinite can be split. Infinitives like _circumstare, circumdare, etc._ can be split, especially in poetry. And not only infinitives, other verbal forms as well _(circum ... dederunt)_.


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## Hulalessar

bibax said:


> Strictly, the Latin infinite can be split. Infinitives like _circumstare, circumdare, etc._ can be split, especially in poetry. And not only infinitives, other verbal forms as well _(circum ... dederunt)_.



Noted, but that this is more a case of splitting the prefix from the verb whatever form it takes. Are there any instances (other than in poetry!) where a verb without a prefix is split?


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## Hulalessar

berndf said:


> You are assuming that_ it is me_ is native English and _it is I_ a grammarians' superimposition on the "natural" English grammar. In fact it's the opposite. The tendency to replace nominative by objective case prepositions (e.g. saying_ you are_ rather than _ye are_) is a consequence of the decay of the original five case system and didn't occur before early modern English. Give English a bit more time and _me_ in the subject position  (which today is marked as strongly dialectal) will sound perfectly natural.



What I am saying rather is that the grammarians explanation of why it should be "It is I" is based on Latin.

The transformation from "It am I" to "It is me" seems to be explained by word order becoming fixed to SVO. The first step was the feeling that if "it" comes first the verb must agree with it and so "am" changed to "is". Next was the feeling that pronouns coming after a verb need to be in the object form even if the pronoun is not in fact the object and so "I" became "me".

Running somewhat counter to form being determined by word order is that (strict) grammatical rules are liable to break down where distance is involved. Those who always say "I went to London" may say "Me and John went to London" and those who always say "John went to London with me" may say "Mary went to London with John and I". "Me and John went to London" can be explained by "and John" intervening so that the pronoun gets disconnected from the verb. "Mary went to London with John and I" is explained by hypercorrection. Children are taught that "Me and John went to London" should be "John and I went to London" - the "I" coming after "John" as a matter of politeness; it is though the intervention of "John and" which allows the departure from the general rule that "with" must be followed by an object pronoun. Such cases are though exceptions and there are no signs that speakers of standard English are moving towards saying "Me went to London" or "John went to London with I".


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## berndf

While there are examples of split infinites in middle and early modern English, they had all disappeared by the end of of the early modern English period. The modern split infinitive is a genuine 18th century innovation against which early 19th century grammarians ran rampage.

Prescriptive grammarians of all periods and all cultures have had the automatic reflex of seeing any language change that hadn't been initiated by themselves as ultimate proof of the demise of all civilisation and culture. This has been so with the split infinitive and with the intrusion of oblique pronouns into nominative case territory and both have absolutely nothing to do with Latin but are internal changes in English.


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## Hulalessar

berndf said:


> While there are examples of split infinites in middle and early modern English, they had all disappeared by the end of of the early modern English period. The modern split infinitive is a genuine 18th century innovation against which early 19th century grammarians ran rampage.
> 
> Prescriptive grammarians of all periods and all cultures have had the automatic reflex of seeing any language change that hadn't been initiated by themselves as ultimate proof of the demise of all civilisation and culture. This has been so with the split infinitive and with the intrusion of oblique pronouns into nominative case territory and both have absolutely nothing to do with Latin but are internal changes in English.



Agreed, except to emphasise that the early 19th century grammarians justified their stance by appealing to Latin.


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> ...the early 19th century grammarians justified their stance by appealing to Latin.


Until you provide concrete evidence this nothing but an unfounded assumption.

This is one of those urban legends that have been repeated so many times that people have stopped asking if it was actually true.

It is true that traditional grammarians hold Latin grammar in high esteem and that they think that most of its concepts apply universally to all European languages. This at times produces difficulties in analysing certain features of languages. But that is mainly internal to grammar itself and rarely impacts actual language use*. The only example I am aware* of *is the opposition to dangling prepositions.
____________
* Except in the opposite direction where Latin induced concepts into modern languages or prevented its disappearance through learned language. But that is an normal case of register specific foreign language influence and has nothing to do with prescriptivism.


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## Hulalessar

My reading over the years has led me to the view I have. The only authority I can provide without research is _The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language_:

"The fact that there was no authority for separating [infinitives] in Latin [...] made the usage particularly unappealing [to traditional grammars]."

EDIT: A little research since writing the above appears to confirm Berndf's position. See here: Split infinitive - Wikipedia


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## berndf

Your quote has to do with the footnote to my previous post. If a new construction corresponds to a Latin paradigm this usually mutes grammarians' opposition to change. In this case there was none, so this opposition could prevail over almost two centuries. If you read early 19th century grammarians' comments on the split infinitive, there is actually no reference to Latin (Wikipedia has a few quotes).


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## gburtonio

The traditional grammars spent a huge amount of time dealing with 'concord' and 'agreement'. It seems almost obsessional, and you can feel the desire to try and fix areas of usage that are often ambiguous in English. But generally in their justifications in this area, the grammarians don't refer to Latin – there's generally more a sense of what is right, or logical. It's not hard to see why they wouldn't like 'It's me/him/her etc.' – there's no reason to expect an accusative form after 'be', since 'be' doesn't take an object. It doesn't take an appeal to Latin to come to that conclusion.

There are plenty of traditional grammars available on archive.org. A useful one to look at is Lindley Murray's work: English Grammar Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners. With an Appendix, Containing Rules and Observations, for Assisting the More Advanced Students to Write with Perspicuity and Accuracy ... By Lindley Murray : Lindley Murray : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive  This was phenomenally popular in both the UK and the USA, so we can assume it reflected orthodox thinking at the time.


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## Nino83

About "it is + pronoun", I've found this interesting article.
There is a split between English, Danish, Norwegian (most varieties) North Frisian (It is us, Det er os, Det er oss, Dåt as üs) and Icelandic, Faroese, Swedish, Norwegian (some varieties), German, Dutch, West Frisian, Afrikaans (Það erum við, Tað eru vit, Det är vi, Det er vi, Das sind wir Dat zijn wij, Dat bin ik Dit is ek).

In the first group the verb agrees with the neuter pronoun "it" (which became the subject) and the predicate takes the accusative case.
The languages of the second group retain the original structure.

The history of this shift in English is the following:

Old English and Early Middle English: ic hit eom (‘I it am’)
Late Middle English (Chaucer): it am I
Early Modern English: it is I
Modern English: it is me

I think that it is not necessary to bring the Latin grammar into it. 

N.B.
The languages of the first group are, curiously, the same ones where some dative subjects have become nominative subjects, in constructions with the verb "like", for example (see this article).
Ihr gefallt mir (German), Mér líka þessir bátar (Icelandic) vs. I like you/those boats.
Similarly in Romance languages, _mi piacciono le mele_ (Italian, dative subject) vs. _j'aime les pommes_ (French, nominative subject).

I don't know if these changes are related.


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## Scholiast

Greetings all round

Coming rather late to this engaging discussion, I must ask for indulgence if there is anything important I have missed.



berndf said:


> The modern split infinitive is a genuine 18th century innovation against which early 19th century grammarians ran rampage



Yein, Bernd. Native English-speakers are (mostly, and notoriously) hopeless at understanding their own, let alone anyone else's, syntax, but English remains a Germanic language. Could you endorse (for example) "zu hoffentlich gehen"?

The most valid objection to the split infinitive is that it is (usually) just lazy as well as ugly, and debases the rhetorical force of an expert like Byron, who (_Love and Death, Last Lines_) concludes...

"...To wrongly, strongly, vainly love thee still".

Σ


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## berndf

Scholiast said:


> Could you endorse (for example) "zu hoffentlich gehen"?


This would mean: _Going to a place/person/event called "hoffentlich"_.

Anyhow. In 18th century English is was an innovation, even if it existed in related languages or in earlier English itself.


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## Hulalessar

berndf said:


> In 18th century English is was an innovation, even if it existed in related languages or in earlier English itself.



Further research suggests that not all authorities agree that is the case. I am though in no position to argue the question since I have never personally looked into the matter. Whatever the position, what seems to have happened (at least in writing) is that at some time after "to" became required it was analysed (by at least some and not necessarily consciously) as belonging to the verb. Later, it was reanalysed so that it was not felt to be glued to the verb. Take the example of "go" when used to express the future.

Compare:

_"I hope you are not going to eat that chocolate."

"I am going to whether you like it or not."_

with:

_"I hope you are not going to London to tomorrow."

"I am going whether you like it or not."_

The first case (to which no one can object) indicates that the "to" is felt to belong to "go" rather than "eat". Once you have done that it is a short step to considering "to boldly go" to be acceptable.


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> that not all authorities agree that is the case.


Like who?


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## Hulalessar

Thomas R. Lounsbury_ The Standard of Usage in English_ page 256: The standard of usage in English : Lounsbury, Thomas Raynesford, 1838-1915 : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive


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