English Grammer

When studying English grammar, it’s interesting to think about the history of the English language and how the rules we take for granted came about. If we go back to the plays of William Shakespeare, we will find that in many places his grammar is what we would today consider very wrong but in his day was considered correct. Similarly, John Donne’s “Valediction Forbidding Mourning” contains the line: “…makes my circle just/and makes me end where I begun,” which uses a form of begin that today we would call incorrect since “begun” needs a helping verb, such as “have” while “began” is the only past form of the word that stands on its own. Over the centuries, these rules slowly took shape.

Scholars between 1600 and 1900 tried hard to force English into more regular grammatical forms, usually based on Latin, to give the language predictability and what they saw as the nobility of the dead Roman language. They tried to apply a number of rules, such as the prohibition on split infinitives, to conform to Latin grammar. For a time, it worked; but during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, language experts rebelled against the Latin influence and have celebrated a more open and dynamic form of English. English grammar continues to evolve and change as the language develops, and today the rules of English grammar are quite different in New York, London, Delhi, and elsewhere.

Articles