English Grammar, recommended revolutionary accomplishment, is the scientific study of how English generates sentences from their interpretations.
---Emmanuel Goldstein
Blind to its reputation for empty pomposities, all unawares of the English tradition of political satire, The Times newspaper has long taken a secret pride in its ancient nickname, 'The Thunderer'. So much so that it now runs an occasional column under that very head, a column wherein divers self-appointed pundits are invited to wax splenetic on some or other perceived unseemliness in our quotidien culture. Last year they handed the whisky and the car keys to one of our National Treasures: Anne Widdecombe, spinster of this parish and Member of Parliament for Maidstone and Thanet. I recommend a visit to her website. Especially to the Junior pages. And especially to her cat-poetry. And you might care to view the Wideo Video. Ridiculous woman.
Her theme was English Grammar, perennially fascinating topic and recommended revolutionary accomplishment. Her targets were the ignorant (which class turns out to contain most of us), and (who should know better) their teachers.
"Schoolchildren are no longer drilled in the proper use of the infinitive," she thundered. "They are no longer trained in the correct deployment of the subjunctive mood. Nor have they been schooled to identify the vast array of English tenses - the perfect, the imperfect, the pluperfect, the future perfect...." And so on, and so forth.
Those who have read Stephen Pinker's little book 'The Language Instinct', and have studied his chapter on The Language Mavens, will recognise these and similar slingshots as shibboleths, badges of class membership which have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with English Grammar properly conceived. The silly woman betrays her utter ignorance of the way English actually works, and her utter contempt for anyone who has not learnt to say 'shibboleth'. For the plain truth is that
[1] English has NO infinitive
[2] English has NO moods, neither subjunctive nor indicative nor any other.
[3] English has precisely TWO tenses - Present and Past.
Correct revolutionary thinking on [2] and [3] will emerge later in term. For now I concentrate on [1].
The Widdecombe rant concerns our habit of 'splitting' the so-called infinitive:
"The towers began to slowly collapse.",
or your favourite and mine:
" Space... the final frontier ... These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before...".
These are sentences where the adverb intrudes between the particle ''to" and a form of the verb. Correct usage, we are lectured, demands instead "The towers began to collapse slowly", "..to go boldly where no man has gone before.."
MADNESS. It is one of the ADVANTAGES of English - as opposed to almost all other languages - that it allows such flexibility in the placement of the adverb, affording the facility of nuancing the precise aspect of adverb to verb. In the message-fragment encoded by "to boldly go" the boldness is integrated much more closely into the action than it is in "to go boldly". We don't want to go boldly. We want to boldly go. And there is a palpable difference.
And how is English able to do this? Precisely because it has no infinitive. An infinitive, in languages which have one, is a single word, a specific form of the verb, with (usually) a specific ending stuck on the verb stem. Thus:-
Latin: ire audacter
French: aller courageusement
Italian: avanzare con coraggio
Spanish: andar intrépidamente
Sanskrit: sattwena gantum
German: tapfer zugehen / tapfer zu gehen
Notice two things. First, word order is fixed in all of these languages except Latin. There is only one slot for the adverb. So the aspect of adverb to verb cannot be shaded. Second, it is impossible to 'split' any of these (genuine) infinitives, because they are single words. There is nowhere to locate the adverb in-between their morphological parts.
English instead uses two separate words. The particle 'to' and the base form of the verb. And separate words, in isolating languages like English, are made to be separated. The case of German, the closest to English on this matter, is instructive. German 'zu' corresponds quite closely to English 'to', and German 'gehen' is indeed the verb base. But the 'zu' sticks like glue to the 'gehen'. Even though the 'zu' can be written as a separate word, German does not allow any other item to intrude between it and the 'gehen'. You may separate them physically on the page, but they cannot be isolated: they are treated as if a unit.
English has clearly not followed the same evolutionary path, or English would now have forms such as 'togo', 'tofall', 'tolove', etcetera.
And there it is, and there you are, and there you have it. That silly ignorant woman has at a stroke deprived herself of one of those aids to elegancy of expression which English standardly affords and other languages do not. AND she wants the state system in all its pomp to deprive the rest of us as well. She wants us to be forced to not split infinitives. Oh shit! I mean of course, forced not to split infinitives.
And with that final shaft, I consign her to ROOM 101.
-oOo-
English is historically one of the languages of the poor and downtrodden in these islands. As opposed to Imperial Latin, the language of class dominance these last thousand years. English has survived despite violent and bloody attempts at suppression. And all of those mantras so dutifully intoned by Wibbly-Wobbly-Widdy make perfect sense in Court Latin. In Latin it is a gross error to split an infinitive. Latin verbs are marked for mood, the subjunctive amongst others. Latin verbs do display a wondrous variety of tense-markers. What we are seeing here is not English, but Latin grammar, conceived in superiority, and imposed willy-nilly on the speech of the unruly natives.