[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 ain’t 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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