Thought Experiment for my Linguistic Friends

Grammar is a recognition of what already is true of the way a language works, not what builds the language itself. In other words, though we look at Paul’s writing in the original Greek and discuss issues such as noun declensions, it is probable that as Paul wrote:

Παῦλος ἀπόστολος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ διὰ θελήματος θεοῦ

he probably was not thinking along the lines of “Ok, my name is in the nominative case, so to make the word ‘apostle’ appositional it must also be in the nominative case. Also, to show that I’m an apostle of Jesus, I need to write his name in the gentive case. Of course, because I want my readers to know that I am an apostle, not by my own declaration, but because God ordained it, I should use a preposition that shows some sort of means followed by another genitive that shows possession.”

Well, maybe he did, but I highly doubt it. He wrote it as we would have written it in English- without much thought to the categories. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God. Here’s the thought experiment (which is totally speculative, so have fun with it).

Imagine the world in 2000 years. American English had become the dominant language for global business and trade. America itself had become a dominant world power, and subsequently fallen- possibly to a band of barbarians roughly around the lifetime of a great theologian from Africa, who subsequently wrote a book on how the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of the world would continue to exist together. Just for the sake of argument of course. English, as a language, continued to exist, but in a more modern form that was different from the street language of the day. During an excavation, a group of archeologists unearth many manuscripts that included Laws, Biographies, 21st Century history, personal letters, books of song lyrics, and, just for fun, the apocalyptic writings of John Haggee. The manuscripts are written in ancient English. For the sake of being a thought experiment, all english grammars were burned in the great fire that was set to the Library of New York, which happened to be the biggest library at the time.

What systems of grammar do you think linguistic professionals will come up with in order to explain English Grammar? Obviously, the names of things like “nominative,” “genitive,” and “participle” aren’t as important as what those labels convey about the syntax in this experiment, so give labels if you want, but make sure to be descriptive. So have at it. Give me a brief beginner’s ancient English grammar, or a thicker intermediate/advanced Grammar. In other words, tell me why I write the way I do, as seen 2000 years into the future.

Difficulty: try and divorce what you know as English grammatical categories, and pretend that you are in fact looking back at an ancient, dead language when you consider English.

Bonus fact of the day: The easiest job in the world is to be a linguist who believes in deconstructionism.