[B-Greek] Nouns, Verbs, and such stuff
John Sanders
jfs at jfsanders.com
Sat Mar 3 07:00:09 EST 2007
I was not intending to comment on this post, but with some commentary going
about lately, I thought I should.
Samuel Lamerson has written that nouns are the backbone of the sentence
and someone else has declared that nouns are treated as arguments of the
verb and that statement is an egregious error. I neither know Mr. Samuel
Lamerson nor am acquainted with his book, but let me play devils advocate
here. You say it aint so, I say the nouns are the backbone of the system,
and they rest on the hind legs of the verbal system. Am I wrong? How would
we know? If someone said that the most important word in the English
language was the, or a, or is, or even Robert, what is the criteria
for most important, or what does backbone of the sentence suppose to
mean?
I am using the above item as an intro to something said about Chomsky and
the Prague School. But before I go into that, I would like to present my
thinking by an example from another discipline, the physical sciences.
After Newton, individuals began to describe the physical world with far more
clarity and accuracy than before.
Is anyone suggesting that with any of the modern linguistic theories one can
read Hamlet, or The Declaration of Independence, or Peanuts with
greater acuity than previously done? Is anyone suggesting that with the
new grammars one can write or speak with greater clarity or accuracy than
previously done?
I have been reading the comments that Carl Conrad and Iver Iversen have made
concerning 2 Thessalonians. I see two different methods of describing
speech. It reminds me when a number of years ago my niece was having
problems with arithmetic while she was in elementary school. So one day I
sat down with her and describe the process that was explained in the text.
She did not understand. OK, I thought, so I explained the math operation
differently. She still did not understand. I thought for a little while,
and then explained it in a different way, this time she understood.
That is all that I see here. These are just different means of explaining
the same phenomena. The only one that is superior is the one that makes
sense for you, the individual. I suspect that many of these professors,
though, are in some type of gnostic brotherhood and believe if you follow
their method exclusively you will achieve language Nirvana.
One last comment about Chomsky. He has put many an idea forward that needs
to be reviewed or thought about, but I personally do not follow him either
politically or intellectually. I believe that one can make a case that the
present day educated American (that is someone who has graduated from High
School) is less capable of explaining the English language than his
equivalent a century ago. And furthermore, I believe one can make the claim
that this decline in scholarship is due to two influences, what I would
label as Deweyism and Chomkyism (There is one more influence-Keynesian
economics, but that theory legitimizes the dumbing down of schools-the
idea is that the longer individuals are in the education process, the less
likely they will enter the job market).
John Sanders
Suzhou, China
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