Anyone who really wants to understand language though should try to find an introductory linguistics course at a local school, if they’re not in college, or to take one, if they are. Or find an intro to linguistics book, of course.

Kit

I shouldn’t post when I’m so tired.

Now, on English grammar, Strunk and White’s THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE is still the standard (despite what some might think) for a first dip into the subject. Get the paperback, not the expensive “illustrated” (with meaningless cartoons) version.

If you really want to get the technical linguistic side of all of this, Silber’s COMPARATIVE GRAMMER OF GREEK AND LATIN is the straight dope, as it were, for putting those languages in an Indo-European context.

And example is the class of Latin verbs falsely called “deponent”, which use passive inflexions to express active meanings. These were originally middle voice verbs expressing a certain amount of subject involvement in the outcome of the action or in the action itself. Over the millenia these meanings evolved further but the forms stayed.

The Old IE root sekw- meant to “see, look at”, which evolved into “keep in sight, hunt for.” (CF english “to seek”). By classical Latin times “sequor” had evolved further into “I follow”.

A further thought on terminology. I suspect that one reason Pat and I misunderstood each other at first is the word “voice”. When we talk about writing, we use voice in two different ways. First, there’s the authorial voice, the overall tone and style of a passage. A passage may have an overall passive tone without ever once using a passive verb if the author’s evasive and vague.

The second is the technical term “voice,” a direct translation of the Latin vox, which refers to one aspect of verbs. Why the Roman grammarians called it “voice,” I do not know, but they did, and the first English grammarians of English just copied it. This is the same mentality that gives us terms like perfect verbs, copulative verbs, and other confusions. “Passive” has changed meaning, too, since it was brought into English. Originally, it meant “having suffered, suffering, putting up with,” and so on. The “Passion of Christ,” for instance, means his suffering on the cross.

Thus, in a passive verb, the object of the verb is “suffering, putting up with” the action of the verb. This was all perfectly clear in 1610.

Now, “voice” in the technical sense answers one simple question: is a verb active, passive, or middle? English has no middle voice, really, though the early grammarians tried to cobble one together out of constructions like “I wash myself” to distinguish it from “I wash the clothes” or “The clothes are washed by me.” Earlier forms of Indo-European languages, such as Classical Greek and Sanskrit, have different verb inflections to mark middle voice, just as they have different inflections to distinguish active and passive verbs.

English has only a very few “inflections”, that is, changes to the way a word’s pronounced (and then spelled) to show a slight change in meaning. We have the -ed or -t to show a simple past tense, and two participles, -ing and -ed or -en, as well as some remnants of ablaut surviving in words that were once Old English strong verbs.

(Some of the ablaut is even disappearing. I have had copy editors change “she wove” to “she weaved” or “he dove” to “he dived”, both of which changes grate on my ancient nerves.)

So, without inflections, how do we show all the various possibilities of verbs? We use participle phrases with helping verbs (auxiliaries, also from Latin) to give our verbs fine shades of meaning. Hence my campaign to rescue “to be” from its philosophically based onus.

This person thought that starting a sentence with a prepositional phrase was an instance of passive voice — any prepositional phrase.

From outside came the sound of voices . . .
In the sky ravens wheeled and shrieked . . .

That kind of thing. One may or may not like such constructions, but they have nothing to with the passive voice.

The older and crabbier I get, the more I wonder along with the professor in the Narnai books, “what are they teaching them in those schools?”

He walked the road, eyes alert.
There! The bird!

This would work, if the context made it clear that spotting the bird was the man reason our ambiguous ‘he’ was walking down the road. The trouble with grammatical examples is they don’t have a context. They’re simple sentences chosen only to make a point, not to convey excitement or whatever. (BTW, ‘eyes alert’ would have to be changed — despite what you read in a lot of genre prose, eyes do not have a separate existence from the person whose head they dwell in.

But why go to all this paraphasing when English grammar and syntax depend upon verbal participle phrases? Now, interestingly enough, I have never seen anyone advise writers to go through and eliminate other auxiliary verbs, only “to be.” If anyone else has, please speak up here. Do we hear or read “there are too many uses of have and do in this passage?” I never have.

So why should “to be” bear all this onus? From what I’ve seen and heard over many years, its connection with the true passive voice is the cause. Writers who don’t understand what the passive voice is, but have heard it’s somehow “bad”, have jumped on the idea of “compounded with a form of ‘to be’” as a sign of the passive. Which isn’t true.

Another problem with ‘to be’ is second important function in English, as a linking verb. A series of sentences like the following, “He was a soldier. I knew because he was in uniform.”, sounds child-like and thus “weak” to the average native speaker, although certainly some very good writers have used this construction effectively in some situations. Most advice to writers books will tell you to minimize the use of ‘to be’ as a linking verb.

So, again we have people who are confused about grammar who have seized on the obvious — “to be” is BAD! This is nonsense and unnecessary both. What counts is using the best verb to shade your presentation of the information in order to maximize its impact. Verbal participle phrases are an important tool in English. They are perfectly idiomatic, not a disease.

Check out the opening of THE SOUND AND THE FURY, for example, and see if Benjy’s troubled observations are as well-done if you change all the verbs. Check out any page of Faulkner, for that matter. Or Hemingway. No matter what one may think of the sort of stories they tell, or their views on women, race, or whatever, when it comes to prose, they could call their shots, all right.