This may be a silly question, but I’m curious – and it might be interesting to think about and discuss.
As I start reading chapter 51 on the infinitive in CGCG (just finished ch 50 on relative clauses – at last!) and I come across grammatical gobbledygook like syntactical roles, marked for suchandsuch, construed with suchandsuch, modified by suchandsuch etc etc the thought suddenly comes to me: What would ancient authors and grammarians think about modern-day English morphology and syntax if they could somehow look ahead two and a half millenia? How would they describe and categorize the use of the infinitive based on their own Greek (or Latin) language? Would Latin grammarians laugh at the idea of English needing a definite article? Would Greek grammarians puzzle over the need for expressing relative tense in English? Would they compare Shakespeare to Ionic and think modern English is like dumbed-down Koine? Would they grasp the fact that in English constituent word order is a syntactic phenomena and wonder why English sentences are so boringly well-ordered? Would they pull their hair out trying to figure out rules for how vowels and dipthongs may sound in English?
Just something to ponder as the year draws to a close
I have often wondered similar thoughts on the ancients take on our modern languages. As a lover of the Latin language in particular I do wonder what Caesar and Cicero would make of all the Romance languages and the use of definite and indefinite articles in them and in English. My guess is lots of eye rolls and head shaking.
