Was Strunk imitating Quintilian?
28th March 2009
Seems pretty obvious to me. For alleged linguists, the guys at Language Log oft times show astonishing ignorance of real languages and their history.
How many people start sentences (really: sentence fragments) with a conjunction (and, but)? Where did they pick that up? Well, how about from the Bible? St Paul does it all the time — not surprising, since that’s a standard grammatical feature of Greek — and most translators of the Bible kept the same structure, for “authenticity” (Word of God and all that, you know).
March 28th, 2009 at 17:06
*OF COURSE* Strunk was imitating Latin grammar. All the 18th and 19th century grammarians were copying Latin grammar, because they had learned Latin grammar in school. They inferred (correctly) that knowledge of Latin grammar was the mark of a good education, and then inferred (falsely) that English grammar had the same structure. That’s the origin of such rules as not ending sentences with prepositions and not splitting infinitives (both of which are impossible in Latin but work fine in English and always have).
If they instead the German language had studied, then like this perhaps they the English language to be structured would have insisted.