English is stupid. Furthermore, your Latin teacher was better equipped to teach you English grammar than your most likely clueless English teachers, because here's the "they don't really want you to know" secret about English:
In the 1600s*, post-medieval, when Gutenberg got all about publishing, intellectuals decided English needed some rhyme and rhythm. The intellectuals at the time of course were, you guessed it, Roman Catholic monks. What language were the Roman Catholic monks schooled in: LATIN. So when it came to giving English rules, the monks decided to use Latin rules for grammar because Latin was unchanging and the holy language of God. However, English doesn't come from Latin. It borrows stuff from Latin and a lot from French, which does come from Latin, but at its core English is Germanic, that barbarian tongue of the north. Thus what results are absolutely bizarre circumstances like:
Consider the phrase: "To Boldly Go Where no Man has gone before..." Sound odd? Sound ungrammatical? Well it is. According to proper grammar of English one cannot separate an infinitive. "To go" is an infinitive and "boldly" is an illegal immigrant deteriorating the purity of the infinitive. Why you ask? Because in Latin infinitives are one word, which physically can't be separated. Ex. "ire" which translates "to go" (as opposed to "eo" 'I go') Thus the intellectuals enforced this ridiculous standard on English. Can't do it in Latin, then one must certainly not do it in English.
It's utterly preposterous. The same with ending sentences in prepositions. Ex. "I want to be where you are at." as opposed to "I want to be at that place where you are." Which sounds more natural? Which is grammatically correct? This problem arises in questions all the time in English. Ex. "Where did you come from?" v "From where did you come?" In Latin, however, a hanging preposition was ungrammatical for a multitude of practical reasons that just don't apply in English.
Fundamentally, the grammar of Latin is incompatible with English in that they are two different species of language, so to speak. English is isolating with little inflection and fixed word order. That is, "John saw Mike" and "Mike saw John" are semantically different because no part of "John" or "Mark" tell you whether they are the subject or object but where they appear in the sentence does.
In Latin, on the other hand, "Brutus Julium videt" and "Julium Brutus videt" and "videt Brutus Julium" etc etc etc all mean the same "Brutus sees Julius" because not the word order but the word itself tells you what it is. Because of this foundational difference in types of languages, many of Latin's rules that were imposed on English are awkward, misleading, unhelpful, and over all stifling.
Nevertheless, for standardization's sake, the rules remain. What is interesting however, is the fact that newer generations of teachers aren't teaching many of the more archaic rules. Media, and especially the Internet, along with the globalization of English, are rapidly reducing the vestiges of Latin grammatical control where natural sounding utterances replace so called grammatical ones. Hence forth, "to boldly go" and "where did you come from?" are becoming more and more accepted. With the abomination that is teaching English abroad these rules get lost and obscured.
That being said, in formal or academic work, that is if one is submitting a business proposal or thesis or what have you, then, although the above mentioned mistakes may go by unnoticed, other conventions from Latin will surely show if not implemented. So anything goes on Facebook or blogs. But as far as improving one's education or economic standard of living based on faulty English mishaps simply won't happen. Academia (and government) tends to love to preserve those things in which it creates, and as Galileo discovered, even when academia and the governing body are wrong, they tend to want to keep the status quo.
Anyhoo, that was not so much my rebuttal as my bolstering your claims with evidence! Go forth and declare the ridiculousness that is English grammar. But know too that poor language is a chained prisoner of the the governing bodies that yield it. As Jared Diamond sited in Guns, Germs and Steel, literacy is the greatest tool of oppression. To rid the oppression, people need learn the rules by which the governing bodies rule. So if one is a disenfranchised Cambodian seeking to learn English so to gain a better education abroad or if one is a marginalized African-American from the ghetto, both need to learn a second language, that language is Standard English whose grammar remains intact, Latin idiosyncrasies and all.
*In the words of Wikipedia: "Citation needed" I still have to consult my linguistic books on the actual time period. But the notion stands.
The above was in response to a wonderful rant written to me by my good friend Seth, sounding off on the lies his English teachers told him.
I have a ton more to come, and with term papers to procrastinate on and a long weekend of anticipating traveling back to the US, you can be sure I'll be posting again soon.
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