The Grammar-Book Effect.

I’m still reading David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules, and I’m delighted to get to a passage I can feature on LH (it’s a superb book, and I want to finish it before I get my eagerly anticipated Christmas present, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity). He’s been talking about how reforms intended to increase “transparency,” for example in universities (his example is the Cambridge anthropology department), tend to “turn custom into a kind of board game”:

Faced with such demands, everyone’s first impulse was just to say, “Well, sure, we’ll just write that for the authorities and proceed as we always have.” But in practice this quickly becomes impossible, because the moment any conflicts crop up, both parties will automatically appeal to the rule-book.” […]

If we think about it, this sort of thing happens all the time—and even in contexts that have nothing to do with arbitrary personal authority. The most obvious example is language. Call it the grammar-book effect. People do not invent languages by writing grammars, they write grammars—at least, the first grammars to be written for any given language—by observing the tacit, largely unconscious, rules that people seem to be applying when they speak. Yet once a book exists, and especially once it is employed in schoolrooms, people feel that the rules are not just descriptions of how people do talk, but prescriptions for how they should talk.

It’s easy to observe this phenomenon in places where grammars were only written recently. In many places in the world, the first grammars and dictionaries were created by Christian missionaries in the nineteenth or even twentieth century, intent on translating the Bible and other sacred texts into what had been unwritten languages. For instance, the first grammar for Malagasy, the language spoken in Madagascar, was written in the 1810s and ’20s. Of course, language is changing all the time, so the Malagasy spoken language—even its grammar—is in many ways quite different than it was two hundred years ago. However, since everyone learns the grammar in school, if you point this out, people will automatically say that speakers nowadays are simply making mistakes, not following the rules correctly. It never seems to occur to anyone—until you point it out—that had the missionaries came [sic –LH] and written their books two hundred years later, current usages would be considered the only correct ones, and anyone speaking as they had two hundred years ago would themselves be assumed to be in error.

In fact, I found this attitude made it extremely difficult to learn how to speak colloquial Malagasy. Even when I hired native speakers, say, students at the university, to give me lessons, they would teach me how to speak nineteenth-century Malagasy as it was taught in school. As my proficiency improved, I began noticing that the way they talked to each other was nothing like the way they were teaching me to speak. But when I asked them about grammatical forms they used that weren’t in the books, they’d just shrug them off, and say, “Oh, that’s just slang, don’t say that.” In the end I found the only way I could really learn contemporary spoken Malagasy was to tape-record conversations, try to transcribe them myself, and then ask friends to clarify every time I came across an unfamiliar usage or expression. Nothing else would work: once they had decided these grammatical forms were errors, they simply could not describe them to me in grammatical terms.

In the case of the Cambridge anthropology department, the rules were made explicit, and were then frozen in place, ostensibly as a way of eliminating arbitrary, personal authority. The Malagasy attitudes towards rules of grammar clearly have nothing to do with a distaste for arbitrary authority, and everything to do with a distaste for arbitrariness itself—a distaste which leads to an unthinking acceptance of authority in its most formal, institutional form. After all, what is our first experience of formal, rule-governed authority if not our grade-school teachers? This is as much true in Madagascar as anywhere else. In fact, when I asked my friends why people didn’t really speak the language described in the textbooks, the inevitable reply was always to the effect of “well, you know, people are lazy.” Clearly, the problem was that the entire population had failed to memorize their lessons properly. But what they were actually denying was the legitimacy of collective creativity, the free play of the system.

Comments

  1. Ann A Folsom says

    You don’t need to post this: you may want to make it “had the missionaries come,” not “came.”

  2. I can’t change what Graeber wrote, but I’ve added a [sic].

  3. I suspect an editor stumbled over the construction.

  4. I suspect you’re right.

  5. PlasticPaddy says

    Nah. Intended emendation : Replace “if they came” by “if they had come”. Writer suggests “had they come”. Result: “had they came”.

  6. i suspect this line of graeber’s thinking ties back to ivan illich’s epic essay on 1492, which pivots on the publication of de nebrija’s grammar of castillian (i believe it’s in Shadow Work; what [still, somehow] i have is a xerox in a course packet) as part of a unified social/political project with columbus’ commission and the conquest of granada. it never came up when i knew him in the early 00s, but it was in circulation in the political/intellectual circles each of us moved in during the late 90s.

  7. David Eddyshaw says

    Dixon’s Grammar of Boumaa Fijian refers to “Old High Fijian” (a term apparently coined by Paul Geraghty) to mean the language as codified by the early-nineteenth-century missionaries, and reflecting their fairly frequent grammatical misanalyses and errors; this was subsequently consecrated and imitated as the language of the Bible translation and liturgy.

  8. John Emerson says

    Rozele: I really liked Illich’s work, but as a friend of mine pointed put, and as I think he himself knew, in the US there’s nowhere you can go with it. For better or worse, the US seems to be irretrievably on a different path.

  9. “what they were actually denying was the legitimacy of collective creativity, the free play of the system.”

    That is a very insightful description of the language attitudes inculcated by education almost everywhere – (edit) especially, of course, in diglossic situations.

  10. People do not invent languages by writing grammars, they write grammars—at least, the first grammars to be written for any given language—by observing the tacit, largely unconscious, rules that people seem to be applying when they speak.

    Hmm? This might be the case for previously unwritten languages getting described by liberal-minded missionaries/linguists.

    Written grammars of English back in the day seemed to regard English as an already-corrupt form of Latin. So we get the bogus prescription against split infinitives. Nearly all we know about Gothick is via Bible translations — were the missionaries inventing grammar to calque on the Greek/Latin?

    Are we sure 1810’s missionaries weren’t doing something similar in Madagascar?

  11. This might be the case for previously unwritten languages getting described by liberal-minded missionaries/linguists.

    Which is the vast majority of cases, and is mainly what he’s talking about.

  12. J.W. Brewer says

    Grammar books do not exist in isolation from the more general transition of a language from unwritten to written and the consequent impact of stable written texts on the future development of the language. If there are a bunch of high-profile written texts in the language that for whatever cultural-political reasons will continue to be read after their writers are dead that will inevitably have an effect on the dynamics of ongoing change in the language. Obviously that can play out in all sorts of ways. People may, for example, come to think it Right and Good that the Bible translation in their language is in an extra-special and lofty-feeling register when in fact it is merely archaic. Whether you get a diglossia where new written compositions of a formal nature are expected to be in the same archaic style seems to me to be difficult to predict – easy to find examples where it is and easy to find other examples where it isn’t.

  13. “Had the missionaries came” may or may not be an editing error, but I’ve noticed with increasing frequency the use of simple past tense forms where past participles are expected, e.g. “have went”, “have wrote”.

    This sounds really wrong to my ears as someone who did first learn English from grammar books, but I’ve heard this enough times from those who speak English natively that I wonder if it will no longer be considered incorrect in the future. Same with the rampant use of the hypercorrection “and I” where “and me” is traditionally expected.

  14. Andrej Bjelaković says

    “Between you and I” has an entire Wikipedia page of its own:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_you_and_I

  15. @JE:
    i like illich a lot, but i don’t really think of him as having much to say about ways forward. i think he’s amazing on “how did we get here”, which i think is very important. he’s a certain kind of non-fiction ursula le guin.

  16. @Jongseong I’ve noticed with increasing frequency the use of simple past tense forms where past participles are expected, e.g. “have went”, “have wrote”.

    It’s at least possible you’re hearing (reading?) dialect forms; and the “increasing frequency” is a recency illusion brought on by your increasing competence/ability to notice variants. For those two examples, the participles need suppletion or a more complex verb form. Have you heard “have writ”? (Compare Margaret Thatcher’s exclamation from the despatch box “The Honourable Gentleman is frit!” — which is Lincolnshire dialect.) “some verbs conjugate differently” in some dialects, as we’re finding on another thread.

    (I’m not suggesting that’s what’s happening in Graeber’s piece.)

  17. Ha this stackexchange discussion gives a Google nGram showing ‘have went’ back to the 1800’s, and some examples from earlier.

  18. Good point, AntC; the recency illusion might also be due to the fact that thanks to the internet and online comments, a lot of what I read these days don’t go through copy editing. Usually this just means spelling errors (confusing “they’re” and “their”, “should of” instead of “should have”), but it could also result in dialectal forms being used that you wouldn’t expect in more curated writing. To clarify, it’s something I’m reading rather than hearing, though I will try to listen for spoken examples as well.

  19. Grammar books form part of the external authority to variant reduction, another source is identity construction via focusing – Focusing and proto-standards https://nextcloud.englishup.me/sites/rethunk/focusing

  20. January First-of-May says

    For what it’s worth, despite (or perhaps because of?) my ESL-plus-online background, I found the forms used in the specific sentence in the OP completely normal and expected (to the point where my attempts to rephrase it with different verbs resulted in the exact same tenses), and most of the alternatives provided in the thread weird and confusing.

    It might be that the alternatives are thinking of a normal past-tense sentence, whereas here we are dealing with a counterfactual (that happens to also be in past tense). I don’t remember the relevant details of grammar well enough to tell what exactly is happening.

    EDIT: “have written” is participle-in-present, “had written” is a participle-in-past. The word “came”, which is identical in its past and participle forms, might be distracting here; look at the next verb, which has the same agreement but is unambiguous. I’d have to check what the grammar books say about it, but I think we’re looking at correct grammar here.

    EDIT 2: I looked up the grammar (on Wikipedia) and this is indeed exactly what is expected for a counterfactual conditional set in the past.

  21. Jen in Edinburgh says

    I’m a bit confused about what you’re arguing here, but ‘had came’ is not the equivalent of ‘had written’, it’s the equivalent of ‘had wrote’. Which plenty of people say round here, yes, but it’s not the register I would use to write a book.

  22. January First-of-May says

    I’m a bit confused about what you’re arguing here, but ‘had came’ is not the equivalent of ‘had written’, it’s the equivalent of ‘had wrote’.

    …oh. I somehow thought that the past participle of “come” is “came” but apparently it’s “come”? TIL.

  23. There is another peculiarity to the principal parts of the verb come. Come—along with, perforce, become—may be the only English verbs that can still take a be form in the past participle. “We are come to the point of decision,” (or, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”) is affected and archaizing, but not obsolete the way, “The fox is run through the fields,” is.

    Other similar forms do still exist, but in, “He is gone,” gone is reinterpreted as functioning as an adjectival. This does license more liminal constructions like, “He is gone to ground,” though; grammar is never as simple as some might like. I also had trouble composing the “fox” sentence above. My brain really wanted to complete, “The fox is run…,” as something like, “The fox is run up a tree,” since that can be grammatical with a different, transitive adjectival sense of run, making the sentence into a passive instead of a past participle. (It helps that the principle parts of the strong verb run are: run, ran, run; with the past participle the same as the present. This has the same pattern as the principal parts of come: come, came, come; although the two do not actually belong to the same ancestral group of Germanic strong verbs.)

  24. “had the missionaries came [sic –LH] and written their books two hundred years later, current usages would be considered the only correct ones”

    That seems fine in a complete sentence, but not in the longer sentence that is used:

    “It never seems to occur to anyone—until you point it out—that had the missionaries came [sic –LH] and written their books two hundred years later, current usages would be considered the only correct ones, and anyone speaking as they had two hundred years ago would themselves be assumed to be in error.”

    That does not. It should be broken up in two or three sentences for “come”, rather that “came” to be appropriate.

    “came and written” sounds fine to me in the shorter sentence, but not in the longer one. I think I perceive a discontinuity between “came” and “written” not represented by punctuation.

  25. Jen in Edinburgh says

    Which do you think ‘he is risen’ is?

  26. “came and written” sounds fine to me in the shorter sentence, but not in the longer one.

    Whether it sounds good to you or not, it’s wrong (from the point of view of Standard English). “Had came” is simply incorrect.

  27. J.W. Brewer says

    Poking around for 19th-century instances of “had came” I found this from an early-ish edition of the Book of Mormon: “And it came to pass that after we had came down into the wilderness unto our father” etc etc. A current “official” version I find on the web, however, has “had come.” (This is 1 Nephi 5:1.) A little bit later (verse 4) the old edition has “And it had came to pass that my father spake unto her” and again the current online version has “had come.” That said, you can find the “had came” construction in multiple printings as well as in other passages. OTOH there’s a modern scholarly edition that puts the 1830, 1837, and 1840 editions in parallel columns so you can spot variations, and in another place the 1830 has “when Alma had came to the city of Ammonshah” and the other two have “had come,” which is the reading of the official online version of Alma 8:8.

  28. Well, that might be an artifact of the reformed Egyptian substrate.

  29. Jen in Ediburgh: Kyrie Eleison?

  30. @Jen in Edinburgh: I only think of, “He is risen,” as a direct quote—just like, “Now I am become death….” Both come from English translations of religious scriptures, which were archaizing even at the time the translations were made. If I try to use a different subject with be risen, I get something that sounds ungrammatical to me (although maybe somebody with more personal experience of charismatic Christianity might adjudge differently):

    *They are risen from the dead.
    *She is already risen from bead this morning.

    As I already noted, however, things are more subtle than they might seem upon first inspection. Demarcating what exactly is a past participle and what an adjectival can be tricky. In particular, unlike some parallel forms, risen sometimes seems to be a little dicey as an adjectival. Referring to “the risen sun” sounds like I personally might write, but I think it might be awkward to the point of ungrammaticality for some people. However, I think “the newly-risen sun” would be unremarkable to any English speaker.

  31. J.W. Brewer says

    To Brett’s point, in 1981 Blue Öyster Cult sang “Joan Crawford has risen [not “is risen”] from the grave.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQBJfQhpw_U

  32. PlasticPaddy says

    @brett
    i had the feeling that “is risen”, “is come” was not archaising in the time of the KJV. In prose Shakespeare has the lines
    What shouts are these? The other side o’ the city is risen: why stay we prating here?
    (Cor.I.i)
    Madam, the Lady Valeria is come to visit you.
    (Cor.I.iii)
    her death itself, which could not be her office to say is come, was faithfully confirmed by the rector of the place.
    (AWTEW.IV.iii)

    In the first of these you could say there was an adjectival or emphatic tinge, maybe in the second you could say this is a servant speaking , and in the third the usage is mocking, but this begins to look like special pleading.

    As a bonus I throw in Caesar:
    And look where Publius is come to fetch me.
    You could say he is talking to his wife…

  33. My earlier teaser to @Jongseong is Shakespeare Sonnet 115

    > Those lines that I before have writ do lie,

    (Although I can’t voice them without hearing in my head Peter Sellers as Bluebottle.)

  34. J.W. Brewer says

    If you do a cursory search of 19th-century hits for “she is come” in the google books corpus, most are of a religious nature and/or represent “dialect,” but you can find some in a purely secular context, e.g. barristers’ arguments to an English court, where the “she” was a ship whose loss was or was not covered by a particular insurance policy depending on whether she was already come to port at the time of the incident. But obviously legal-jargon register can preserve archaisms.

  35. Brett: Germans confusing participles with adjectives is extremely annoying when they attempt to write English (or any other language with a clearer distinction between).

  36. @PlasticPaddy: Just to be clear, although the King James Version is well known for using some diction* that was old-fashioned even for the time it was written, I don’t think that the past participle come with a be form was archaic in Shakespeare’s day. However, I am not sure about the analogous risen forms. (Apparently, “risen” appears fifty-seven times in the King James Version, the first appearance being: “The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar.”) On the other hand, Oppenheimer’s, “Now I am become death….” was definitely archaic in 1945. (“Now we are all sons of bitches,” was much more idiomatic.)

    * Why does diction mean “clear enunciation” exclusively in the context of singing? (My off-site OED access seems to be down this evening.)

  37. Also, Sumer is icumen in.

  38. Winter is icumen in,
    Lhude sing Goddamm,
    Raineth drop and staineth slop,
    And how the wind doth ramm!
    Sing: Goddamm.
    Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
    An ague hath my ham.
    Freezeth river, turneth liver,
    Damm you; Sing: Goddamm.
    Goddamm, Goddamm, ’tis why I am, Goddamm,
    So ‘gainst the winter’s balm.
    Sing goddamm, damm, sing goddamm,
    Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.

    – Ezra Pound –

  39. That’s the poem that made me buy my first copy of the Selected Poems as an ignorant college student frittering away time in the bookstore. I couldn’t believe an actual Poet had written anything so funny and memorable.

  40. David Marjanović says

    Nearly all we know about Gothick is via Bible translations — were the missionaries inventing grammar to calque on the Greek/Latin?

    Unsurprisingly, a lot has been written about this. The consensus nowadays seems to be that the translation is literal (from Greek) wherever that was possible, but not beyond that; there are systematic deviations from the original where e.g. a different word order was used or a particular verb form that was available was not used. So, what we have is actually grammatical Gothic, even if it may not all be equally idiomatic.

    Ha this stackexchange discussion gives a Google nGram showing ‘have went’ back to the 1800’s, and some examples from earlier.

    I wonder if some of them date from times when wend, went, went and go, gang, gone were still two separate verbs.

  41. @AntC, apart from its use as a noun, I tend to think of ‘writ’ as an old-fashioned past participle that is used in certain fixed expressions (e.g. writ large), i.e. a form of ‘written’ rather than of ‘wrote’. But apparently ‘writ’ was/is also used as a simple past tense form, although I’m not familiar with this usage.

  42. Cf. frit:

    The right hon. Gentleman is afraid of an election is he? Oh, if I were going to cut and run I’d have gone after the Falklands. Afraid? Frightened? Frit? Couldn’t take it? Couldn’t stand it? Right now inflation is lower than it has been for thirteen years, a record the right hon. Gentleman couldn’t begin to touch!

    Prime Minister’s Questions (19 April 1983). The use of ‘frit’, an unusual Lincolnshire dialect abbreviation of ‘frightened’ which Mrs Thatcher evidently recalled from childhood, was missed by MPs in a noisy chamber but heard very distinctly on the audio feed from the chamber.

    https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher

  43. “That is a very insightful description of the language attitudes inculcated by education almost everywhere – (edit) especially, of course, in diglossic situations.”

    @Lameen, for a Russian (our literary language is as close to what I speak as possible) tired of people who literally hate it (can’t stand it, feel extreme physical discomfort) when someone stresses something impropely the Arabic world is truly refreshing.

    It is oppressive, maybe even more so than here, but the oppression is focused on the langauge taught in schools rather than the langauge spoken at markets. We have no grammar! Freedom.

    I imagine for some foreign learners (like the author) it is difficult: no books and no rules. Yes, even Arabic speaking linguists do not speak about vernacular in grammatical terms, but they are very willing to speak it to a foreigner and to teach it to a foreigner.

  44. Lars Mathiesen says

    Spotted in the wild: “got me my yard work did”. Link on request.

    (I’ve been sitting on this for more than a week, increasingly worried that the continual swerve of some thread or another to the subject of English participle loss should have abated. Losing done is very — thoroughgoing).

  45. J.W. Brewer says

    Here’s an instance (in eye dialect) of participial “did” from 1965, although I have no idea if it actually reflected the non-affected usage of the recording artist or anyone he knew personally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_Bin_Did_and_What%27s_Bin_Hid

  46. The artist being Scottish, I wondered what the DSL might have to say about did as a past participle in Scots, but the answer is “nothing”. It does mention dune/duin as a predicate, but attributes this to contact with nonstandard English (and indeed I find I have did it far more alien than I done it ‘I did it’).

    (The DSL uses the spelling dune as the headword, probably because it’s most common in print, but duin clearly marks it as Aitken vowel 7, which is [ø] in the most conservative forms of Insular Scots, but has merged with [e ~ i ~ ɪ] in the Central Belt and [wi] in the Northeast, whereas ui is both traditional and diaphonetic. Technically one should write tui ‘too’ and dui ‘do’, but not only do they look too weird, but the latter would require the present participle duiin ‘doing’.)

    So it’s probably all about the rhyme.

  47. LH — You might (or might not) be interested in a review essay of *Utopia of Rules* that I wrote a few years back. It’s in a law review, written for an audience of lawyers; I have no real clue how it would read to some other audience. From the abstract: “The book has a variety of fun things to say about public law, and one of them is important.” Anyway, it’s at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3204464.

  48. Thanks!

  49. I just finished it — an excellent summary of Graeber’s ideas, and your discussion is on point and consistently interesting. I like the fact that you say things like “Graeber would likely respond, though, that…” (such willingness to give the hypothetical interlocutor a say is not as common as it should be). I very much like footnote 40 (“Well, strictly speaking, he [Habermas] adopted the word ‘diskurs,’ but “discourse” is the standard English translation”). In your final paragraph you write:

    Graeber suggests no way out of this trap, other than the sweeping away of states and capitalism to achieve a “genuinely non-bureaucratized social order” (pp. 100-01). For most of us, that answer will not satisfy.

    For me as an anarchist, of course it does, but I recognize that’s very much a minority point of view. Thanks for that stimulating review!

  50. David Marjanović says

    I have no idea if it satisfies me, because what Pelosi said to Trump applies:

    “Mr. President, that’s not a plan, that’s a goal.”

  51. Sure. In the present state of affairs, anarchists can only have goals; there’s not a clear enough way forward for a plan (unless you’re the moronic sort of “anarchist” who enjoys breaking windows and/or throwing bombs). I have come to believe actual anarchist social systems will not be possible for many centuries, or perhaps until humanity has evolved some more. That doesn’t stop me from believing in anarchism.

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