Ty Murray Quotes

From the sixteenth century onwards, prescriptive works in Britain largely follow Priscian’s Latin model. Bullokar’s Bref Grammar for English (1586), for example, takes the eight Priscianic word classes set out in William Lily’s Grammar of Latin in English (c.1540) and applies them to English; the prescriptions of Robert Lowth’s Introduction to English Grammar (1762) are likewise informed by Latin, and even by 1795, Lindley Murray’s English Grammar was arguing for three nominal cases (nominative, genitive, accusative), justified on the model of Latin, in spite of the fact that English – then as now – only regularly distinguishes nominative and accusative in pronouns (he saw me vs. I saw him). While prescriptive grammarians of English are no longer as in thrall to Latin as they once were, many complaints about ‘bad’ English, as we saw in Chapter 1, start from assumptions about Latin grammar. Simon Heffer’s Strictly English: The correct way to write… and why it matters, published in 2011, still condemns the use of split infinitives, though its author seems more relaxed than his predecessors about ending sentences with prepositions (p.