Dear Giorgi, Gi2gi,

Thank you for your clear explanation regarding the difference between a Gerund and a Verbal Noun.

In the United Kingdom, from approximately 1750 to 1950, �traditional grammar�, for the majority of scholars, was a difficult, dismal, dreary task. It was a scholarly duty imposed by grammarians on unwilling children, (and I was one of those children). It had little relation to real speaking, real writing, or indeed, to real life itself.

Why was there this negative attitude?

It was because traditional grammar lessons were prescriptive in nature. The teachers insisted that only formal, correct, �proper�, language was worth studying.

Informal styles of speech were ignored, and were frequently condemned as incorrect. They were considered not worth studying.

In addition, the system of teaching used the grammar of the Latin language as a basis. Consequently, children in school were forced to use a classification system, and a terminology, which has little in common with the English language.

Why do I say this?

Because English is not a part of the Romance (Latin) family of languages, (like Italian, French, Spanish, etc.)

It is a Germanic language, (like German, Dutch, Icelandic, etc.).

Yet, in the past, teachers persisted in trying to pretend that, in some way, the two languages were almost identical.

English and Latin are as different as chalk and cheese.

In my senior school, in 1941 to 1946, attitudes in the classroom began to change. In English lessons, there was much less emphasis on formal grammar. Lessons began to include �ordinary English�, the language of the playground, for example.

I remember when my class was asked to write an essay in any local dialect. My friends in class read their essays in Scottish, Cumbrian, Yorkshire, and Cockney dialects. I read my essay in Geordie dialect � the language that I spoke in the street.

In a similar way, a new generation of education writers began to produce books which were less formal, but were still informative. They were usually much less prescriptive. Some authors began to drop ancient grammar phrases which often caused difficulties to scholars. In their place, they devised phrases which were much more appropriate to the English language.

In �A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language�, 1985, Professors Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvick, assisted by Professor David Crystal wrote:

Page 7: �� it is now less usual than in the past for teachers to attempt to make the local spoken variety (of English) conform with some educated spoken norm�.

Page 189: �This terminology, modelled on that used for inflectional languages such as Latin, can be misleading when applied to English ��

Page 1292: �For reasons that will now be plain, we do not find it useful to distinguish a gerund from a participle, but terminologically class all the -ing items in [5-14] as PARTICIPLES�.

�This lack of correspondence between the English gerund and the traditional use of the term can be advanced as a further reason for rejecting the term gerund in English�.

They continue with a full page of detailed arguments. I will not bore the Members with this.

I am with David Crystal, when he writes in his Encyclopedia of English, �The fundamental purpose of grammar is all to do with making sense --- to communicate intelligibly�.

In my opinion, it is irrelevant whether the individual knows grammar intuitively, or whether he/she has a detailed knowledge of grammar.

If a person can communicate intelligibly, for me, that is the end of the matter.

Best wishes,

Les Douglas