Language and English

As a guy with a degree in linguistics, I have to disagree with you. Word order != sentence structure. Certainly word order in English differs (and sometimes violently) from other languages -- German is another good example with how verbs move around, V2 structure, etc. Nevertheless, the components of a sentence are in fact universal. Every complete sentence in Swahili has a noun phrase and a verb phrase (you can think of this as subject and predicate if you like, although that's not necessarily true), just as in English. Every language has some idea of a subject. Every language has ideas of who did what to whom. While English grammar classes primarily aim to teach you the idiosyncracies of English, of which there are far too many, they also teach you the parts of English that are also universal to all languages, and this is inherently valuable. Moreover, it gets you used to the idea of learning the grammar of a language, even if the grammar of your next language is totally different. -- ----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu -- It's not illogical to believe in God. --------------------------------------