ABOUT grammar: I once had German lessons from the poet Edwin Muir's wife, Willa, who spoke excellent German but who, like her husband, knew virtually nothing about the rules of German grammar. Since Edwin and Willa successfully translated the works of Kafka from German into English, their lack of knowledge of German grammatical rules clearly didn't matter.
What did matter was their having assimilated the grammar of German as an inherent property of the language, resulting from reading German authors and speaking and listening to good German speakers.
Teachers and others who speak and write English ungrammatically have simply never properly assimilated their native language in the way that the Muirs assimilated German. The speech and writings of people in this predicament are not so much semi-literate as pseudo-literate.
The academic study of the causes, nature, and social tolerance of pseudo-literacy has, of course, long been enormously indebted to Jimmy Reid for his weekly column in The Herald.
John McLellan,
44 Terregles Avenue, Glasgow.
April 19.
I AM in total agreement with Louis Dunn's comments and experience (April 17). I too in my time have on many occasions heard the ''I seen'' and ''She has went'' spoken by teachers who, I must assume, saw no wrong in their utterance.
In all of the recent correspondence, however, I have been frequently reminding myself of a truism which was passed on to me as a very young teacher an equally long time ago: that ''every teacher is a teacher of English''.
It would seem that all these years later I am expected to be reasonably satisfied if some who work in English departments (and primary departments) really appreciate the importance and relevance of good basic teaching of our language.
Craig MacMillan,
24 Connel Crescent, Mauchline.
April 17.
MAY a retired engineer be so bold as to intervene in the discussion of a subject, the teaching of English, which those who graced the arts quad of their alma mater no doubt regard as their special preserve?
Civilisation is communication and the higher the level of that civilisation the greater the demand it makes on the means of communication. Fundamental to this therefore must be competence in one's own language. To this should be added at least a basic understanding of one or more of the world's most important languages. Latin, with Greek, is the foundation of several of these, hence the relevance of both, even today.
Adequate competence in a language can only be achieved with rigorous teaching and much practice. It may indeed be possible to gain fluency in the use of one's native tongue by using it to express ideas on other subjects, but a grasp of the basic rules can only be given by teaching these rules as a subject in its own right.
Children who have not acquired such competence have been cheated by their teachers; they will be hard put to recover this lost ground in later life. Are not most of the critics objecting to poor rather than rigorous teaching?
It is surely, at the very least, bad manners to write badly, for then the burden of interpretation is placed not on the writer but on the reader.
We accept the need for enforcing rules in games, and recognise that the alternative is anarchy; why then should there be any reluctance to accept a like need to use words correctly and according to the rules of grammar?
In my student days I had much trouble with certain subjects and did not at first realise that it was not I who was dimwitted but the authors of some of my textbooks; ideas were not being expressed clearly, there were gaps in arguments, great jumps were made in explanations; these books were examples of poor communication.
We are surrounded with such texts today, some of the worst being the manuals that are supposed to explain how to use technical devices such as computers and videos. A useful class exercise might indeed be the rewriting of one such, so that the basically simple instructions became clear to a lay reader.
You cannot express a thought precisely unless you know how to write precisely, choosing each word so that it is the most appropriate for its purpose and arranging the whole so that the reader is not in doubt as to the argument being presented. This applies whether the subject is rigorously technical or sublimely poetical.
The writer is a craftsman and can only learn his craft by studying under master craftsmen. Though the pen may indeed be mightier than the sword, it can only be thus in the hand of one who knows how to use the words he pens.
George A Davidson,
Redcroft, Prieston Road,
Bridge of Weir.
April 16.
WILLIAM J Dickie reminds us that Shakespeare had Latin and Greek (April 20). Would that more of today's scholars were so favoured!
John McKie,
279 Nithsdale Road, Glasgow.
April 20.
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