A Guiding Body?

Rolling trippingly over the Anglo tongue
By Tim Moore
from The Australian 10 Sep 03

TEACHING English to people who have been reared in other language systems is not an easy job. This is partly because the learning of any new language is difficult - a new vocabulary to learn, new ways of putting sentences together, new idioms whose meanings defy all explanation and so on.
But it has to be said that much of the difficulty stems from the nature of English. This is because there is so much in English that operates outside what some linguists like to call the rules of language.
Indeed, the more I come to know my native language, and the more I see students struggling with its many quirks and complexities, the more apologetic I become. Put simply, English is a mess and something really needs to be done about it.
To find sources of angst for students, we need look no further than the two most common words in the English language - the indefinite article a and its definite counterpart the.
The first challenge for learners is to understand why they should bother to use these words in the first place. Most languages do perfectly well without articles and, indeed, in English the sense of many sentences is quite unaffected if they are omitted.
For a learner to get used to using articles is achievement enough, but to use them correctly requires an intellectual effort on an epic scale. This is because their patterns of use manage to defy all reason and logic. Thus:

We go to the city (definite), but we go to town (no article).
We get up in the morning (definite) but go to bed at night (no article).
We lie in bed (no article), but lie on the couch (definite).
But the difficulties certainly don't stop there. Our article examples point to another logic-defying area of English - the preposition system. Thus, it will be noted that:
We get up in the morning, but go to bed at night.
We lie in bed, but on the couch.

These inconsistencies are bad enough. But the preposition system then shifts into a kind of linguistic twilight zone when it combines with certain verb stems to form those strange grammatical hybrids - the phrasal verbs.

In the following examples, it can be seen how the verb pass is combined with a variety of locative prepositions to produce an utterly arbitrary array of concepts:
Pass through = to travel.
Pass over = to overlook.
Pass on = to transmit.
Pass off = to pretend to be.
Pass up = to refuse (an opportunity).
Pass down = to bequeath.
Pass out = to become unconscious.
Pass away = to die.

These forms, with their notoriously idiomatic meanings, can lead an English learner to believe they are dealing not with an accessible lingua franca but with the arcane tongue of an obscure cabal.

There is a sad story sometimes cited to illustrate just how cruel all this can be. A non-native doctor had the difficult job of telling some aggrieved parents about the untimely death of their son.
"I'm sorry to have to tell you," she said with due gravitas, "but your son has passed out."
A minor error in preposition usage, but a disaster in medical communication.

The small words we have referred to, the prepositions and the articles, strike fear into the hearts of many learners. There is also a single letter that has the same effect - this is s, especially as In nouns, s denotes plural forms (books) and possessives (boy's), which among other confusions produces that annoying ambiguity in speech when the two functions overlap (the boys book = one book, but how many boys?).
In verbs, it is used in contracted forms (It has got = It's got) and for third person singular forms (I read, he reads).
To add to this complexity, there is also the tussle that goes on between the possessive and contracted forms over who gets the apostrophe s.

Yes, in standard English the contracted form wins out (it's = it is, not its possessive) but, alas, in student writing too often it loses.
AND what of that grammatical perennial - tense? Is there any joy to be found here? There is a myth that English has only three tenses - a past, present and future. On a conservative estimate, there are 12 - and this does not include subjunctives and passives.
At one end of the tense scale are rudimentary forms such as the present simple (I go) - straightforward enough. But at the other, we find high-wire constructions such as the pluperfect progressive (I had been going to go).

For many learners, especially those from languages with more slim-line tense systems, English's preoccupation with the precise time frame of events (or formerly anticipated events in the case of the pluperfect progressive) is puzzling, verging on the bizarre.
The myth of there being three tenses in English perhaps arises from a confusion with there being three verb forms - a present, past and past participle form.
These forms, which are the building blocks of English tense construction, are prone to the most wanton of irregularities. In many cases, the pattern sees a root present form (walk), with an -ed suffix added for the past and past participle forms.

But there are many exceptions. For the verb read, all forms look the same, but with an important difference in pronunciation. In the case of the verb become, the odd one out is the past form. For put, the three forms are identical and for go they are all different.
Present: I walk; I read; I become; I put; I go.
Past: I walked; I read; I became; I put; I went.
Past participle: I have walked; I have read; I have become; I have put; I have gone.

In the classroom, one is forever grasping for something vaguely hard and fast - a rule that will reassure the despondent learner and provide just a little certainty among all this caprice.
Sadly, though, these rules are thin on the ground. Ah, here's one - alluded to earlier - that we can pull out: With third person singular subjects, verbs in the present tense take a final s. Thus:
I go; we go; you go.
You (plural) go; he/she/it goes; they go.
Now as rules go, this one is a bit on the trivial side - a hangover from an earlier, more inflected version of the language - but is a rule nevertheless.

So how do students cope when they encounter that well-known monarchist cry - God save the Queen? Here is a third person singular subject (God) and it looks like a simple present form (save).
Why does the verb not take an s? Indeed, why do we not sing "God saves the Queen"? The answer is that the old anthem is not a report on God's behaviour (an indicative form) but an expression of a fervent hope - namely that God in his wisdom will be forever well-disposed towards our monarch. In short, we have chanced upon a lurking subjunctive and our attempts at reassuring our students have collapsed.

So clearly something has to be done about this mess. But how?
The French have a method for dealing with linguistic untidiness in the form of the Academie Francaise, an august body with the prerogative to legislate for certain usages.

Unfortunately, the multinational nature of English means that no such peak body exists. And even if it did, the chance of a panel of world English speakers - Britons, Australians, South Africans, Indians, Jamaicans and so on - coming to any consensus on these matters is about as likely as them agreeing on what the Commonwealth exists for or who is and who isn't a chucker in world cricket. And all this before the arrival of the American delegation.

Alas, we cannot hope for some committee-based solution. The best chance I can envisage is for there to be a kind of coup de langue - where the language is usurped by some enlightened despot with the self-appointed task of fixing it up - to banish its redundancies, iron out its irregularities and generally make it a good deal more presentable than it is in its present form.
Unfortunately, no names in the world of linguistics or elsewhere spring to mind - though that is not to say that they won't in the future.

So what are we to do in the meantime? I believe the only option available to us - we most fortunate and privileged native speakers - is to be generally as sympathetic, tolerant and patient as we can towards those speakers of other languages who do their best to make sense in and sense of our tongue.

And we also need to pay short shrift to those English language chauvinists who like to think there is something a bit special about our language. Remember, there isn't - English is a disgrace!

Tim Moore works in the language and learning unit at Monash University.
© The Australian