THE BLISTERING SUN AND THE WAYWARD GRAMMARIANPeople are usually confused about my ethnicity because
THE BLISTERING SUN AND THE WAYWARD GRAMMARIANPeople are usually confused about my ethnicity because of my dark skin. Just the other day, a cleaner in my gym spoke to me in Malay and when I replied in Chinese, she said she thought I was a Malay because of my colour. But what I find puzzling is there are some naturists who are even darker than me and I’m talking about Europeans who do not have the benefit of my tropical sun. I read in the sun every day which accounts for my colour but how do these Europeans get their tan? Perhaps they fly to some tropical island every now and then to get their share of the sun.To do justice to my rather bizarre title, I will now talk about my book. It’s a gift from my son. Ever since it was first published in 2011, I had avoided it like the plague. It’s written by one of today’s foremost linguists but he has come up with a grammatical analysis that is very much at variance with what the whole world is familiar with. And I’m not talking about the non-academic world. Every dictionary on the planet disagrees with this linguist in his classification of words. Every grammar you pick up (except the one by yet another equally wayward linguist) is sure to disagree with him.I once told him why he was wrong and he replied very briefly that the traditional analysis need not be the correct one without explaining further. But if you accept his analysis and word classification, you will have to say that Nick Gibb was not wrong when a BBC presenter asked him a grammar question and he gave an answer that would be marked wrong in any of the schools he’s in charge of as a schools minister. But to be fair to the writer, his book is pretty good and the reader can see almost immediately what a brilliant mind he’s got. I’ve only started reading the book but I’m not sure how much of it I can tolerate, as he classifies as pronouns some determiners and the existential there, which is what I do not expect of a modern linguist.My son bought it for me, knowing full well the misgivings I have for the author. He said one should sometimes read “heretical and apocryphal works” and how right he was. This is what I’ve always taught my children to do - to read anything and everything that has some academic or literary value even if the church and society oppose it. It’s good to have my advice hurled back at me. LOL -- source link
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