Just wanted to join in to thank you all for responding. I do not do serious etymological research, just what I’ve noticed when looking up a word in my typical desktop dictionary. I’m one of those who never learned about proto-indo-european languages.
But Wendell is arguing against flexibility: he’s arguing that everyone should get linguistics. You and I agree that no one can possibly teach those 26 things in 180 days, so how does adding a 27th thing to the list mean anyone will learn anything different than they are learning now?
Um, because removing one thing and substituting another means exactly that they “will learn anything different than they are learning now”?
O.K., one of the points in English IV is the following
(1) Reading/Vocabulary Development. Students understand new vocabulary and use it when reading and writing. Students are expected to:
(A) determine the meaning of technical academic English words in multiple content areas (e.g., science, mathematics, social studies, the arts) derived from Latin, Greek, or other linguistic roots and affixes;
(B) analyze textual context (within a sentence and in larger sections of text) to draw conclusions about the nuance in word meanings;
© use the relationship between words encountered in analogies to determine their meanings (e.g., synonyms/antonyms, connotation/denotation);
(D) analyze and explain how the English language has developed and been influenced by other languages; and
(E) use general and specialized dictionaries, thesauri, histories of language, books of quotations, and other related references (printed or electronic) as needed.
So my suggestion is to expand (D) to mention Indo-European. This would take less than one class period. Your claim that adding anything to the schedule would cause the entire rest of the schedule to collapse into disorder and would cause the students to rebel and kill their teachers is ridiculous. It wouldn’t hurt to put together some of the other points.
A couple of possible reasons:
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Some do, especially the more specialized or academic ones. The Online Etymology Dictionary that Exapno Mapcase linked to above does so, for example.
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Proto-Indo-European predates writing, so the forms cited in etymologies haven’t been directly attested. That doesn’t mean that what’s there isn’t solid or incontroversial, but there’s no direct evidence for what would be given in an etymology. (Incidentally, the lack of any direct PIE forms still allow secure reconstruction of certain roots and how various features changed in various daughter languages. It’s really quite fascinating.)
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Many more people are familiar with Latin (and Greek) than PIE or other precusors to Latin. That still holds, but I don’t think it’s true anymore than familiarity with Latin is assumed to be part of any substantial education. Still, we have a huge Latin corpus, and it’s far easier to trace a root back to Latin than back to PIE (when those roots actually derive from Latin, anyway).
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There’s a belief that ancient Greek and Rome, and thus Greek and Latin, are the cornerstone of western civilization and the pinnacle of development in the humanities. Once you’ve traced your root back to Latin, why would you care about continuing any further?
Linguistics, as opposed to English, should totally be taught in school. (Er, so should English.) When I was in school, English class was mostly about literature, with the mechanical bits petering out in the higher grades; what fell into the category of linguistics was covered in foreign language classes, and those were either German or Romance languages.
As for the Texas lesson plan mentioned above: Take out, say, some combination of 15(d) and 24-26, and instead beef up 17 to a crash-course in basic linguistics. Or something. It’s certainly not impossible. At the very least, exposing students to constructions in other languages makes them easier to identify in English.
(For that matter, concerning 17(b), the subjunctive mood in English is pretty much dead. It certainly isn’t moribund in, say, French. Japanese doesn’t have a subjunctive mood at all, though there is a volitional verb form that includes some of that functionality. And so on. If you’re going to teach the subjunctive mood at all— and I’m not sure how you’d spend more than a half-hour on it anyway— it would be useful to explain what a subjunctive mood and how (and why) languages have them and other moods that English lacks.)
Oh, and I like Wendell Wagner’s suggestion of incorporating a brief run-through of IE and other language families in point (D) of that item. After all, a large part of high school is trying to introduce students to area that they could be very interested or competent in, and linguistics (as opposed to grammar) isn’t really addressed at all at the high school level. For that matter, I went to undergrad at a university with an exceptional linguistics department, but I never even really realized the subject existed as an academic discipline (as opposed to general classics, or specific languages, or butterfly-collecting-style etymology) until I was in grad school. I regret that.
Ah, but teaching stuff like this would move the course towards actual linguistics as opposed to Peever’s Paradise Pseudo-Linguistics. You know, the land where ‘whom’ is still a vital part of our language and no person shall utter so much as a phrase without feeling the dread fear of outing themselves as [del]lower-class[/del] ungrammatical gripping their intestines.
Oh, and a lot of people apparently believe English is a Romance language. Any twelve deities of your choice help you if that includes any of the tenured English teachers in a district which tries to teach etymology and the real origins of English.
…and where splitting infinitives is terrible, and ending a sentence with a preposition is a mortal sin. I agree with you that the subjunctive could be useful in teaching about real linguistics instead of 19th century ideas about grammar. At the very least, it could give a coherent explanation to students about why modern English has some otherwise unexpected features: a large set of irregular verbs that undergo similar ablaut (e.g., ring -> rang -> rung) in forming past tenses, using defective auxiliary verbs for modality, a full case system for pronouns but nothing at all for ordinary nouns, the complicated orthography, and so on. It’s a fascinating subject, and reducing it to a set of arbitrary rules for students to simply memorize does them a disservice.
That is unfortunate.
I find it odd that posters are saying that the Indo-European origins of English aren’t taught in school. I remember taking it in Grade X English. I went to school in a small town in Saskatchewan and I assume it was part of the standard curriculum.
My college/university didn’t even have linguistics. They had a communications department, and international business, and foreign languages as part of that, but the idea of pure academic linguistics wasn’t even visible.
I picked up what I know of linguistics from my mom’s books and from my own reading.
I learned about PIE, language families, and the general history of languages the same way I learned about everything else when I was a kid. Role-playing games.
It doesn’t work that way. I mean, sure, teachers can talk about some trivia for less than one class period one day, but the number of people knowing anything about PIE will not change, because no one will remember it. To teach something–not just cover it–you have to integrate it into the course, you have to approach it from different angles, refer back to it, connect it to other things you are learning.
Students may well remember covering something one time in class. That’s the time it stands out. But that doesn’t mean it was the only time something was mentioned, or foreshadowed, or referenced later. And it’s all those things that make the knowledge stick. Just touching on something is wasting time, and tossing things in a curriculum to be briefly covered just subtracts time that can be used for other things and does not increase knowledge at all.
And let me make this clear: if it were possible to offer an elective in linguistics in high school, I would be punching old ladies to get to be the one to teach it. But just throwing the edges of it in one day wouldn’t make a difference.
Northern Piper, perhaps there’s a difference between what’s taught in the U.S. and what’s taught in Canada.
So, Manda JO, if there’s no problem teaching about Indo-European in Canada at the same level, what’s the problem in the U.S.?
Presumably their entire curriculum is different. But I suspect that either they either they cover it more than one half of one day, or vanishingly few people remember anything about it.
So there’s an entirely different way of arranging the curriculum for Senior English (one that in my opinion teaches something that’s quite important), but you know nothing about it. So let’s remedy this lack of knowledge. Does someone have a link similar to the one that Manda JO has given with the curriculum for Grade X English in Saskatchewan?
Now you are shifting the goalposts. You proposed the idea that basic linguistics could just be added to senior year, like a drop-in module. That’s the paradigm I am objecting to. Now you want to talk about fundamentally redesigning the high school English curriculum. That’s a Great Debate, and one I’d love to participate in, but it’s going to have to be in December. This is not a good time of year to get coherent debate from a teacher.
In the meantime, would someone link to the curriculum for Grade X English in Saskatchewan so we can compare it with that for the U.S.?
Latin is a very well-attested language that has never been lost from history and is also a major contributor to the languages of the world. Other languages that are well-attested from antiquity include Ancient Greek, Classical Chinese, Biblical Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Sanskrit, and others.
English, as you might or might not know, is, from a linguistics perspective, descended from one or more ancient Germanic tongues, spoken by what the Romans considered to be Barbarians of the North and who eventually became the modern Germans, Dutch, English, and Scandinavians. Other northern barbarians spoke Celtic languages, including Gaulish and the ancestors of Irish, Welsh, Cornish, and Scots Gaelic). The issue is that the ancient Germanic and Celtic languages were not written as often and we don’t know as much about what they were like enough to make strong assertions that such-and-such word originated among proto-English speakers of what is now northern Germany or by proto-Irish speakers in France who were also bilingual in a nonstandard dialect of Old Norse.
English has adopted a very large number of Latin words, but the grammar is still very Germanic. There is now a theory that English grammar was originally very similar to modern German but was Scandinavified by Vikings who had settled in England and that is why modern English word order is nearly identical to modern Danish but rather different from Hochdeutsch.