Diagraming sentences in the 19th century | Hacker News Reader

Diagraming sentences in the 19th century

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74 pointsbenbreen37 comments

One or two of my junior-high-school English teachers—public school, California, around 1970—showed us how to diagram sentences. I don’t remember diagramming (note the spelling) being pushed hard at us, but it did help me start to understand things like clauses, modification, and parts of speech. Later, in college and graduate school, I majored in linguistics, and the transformational grammar popular at the time went whole-hog with a very different system for analyzing the structure of sentences. Although my linguistics teachers were uniformly dismissive of school-taught approaches to grammar like diagramming, in the decades since those less rigorous methods have been more useful to me when writing and editing English.

I had difficulty with English grammar when I was young, until I was taught by an older lady who still taught her classes to diagram sentences.

For whatever reason, it all fell into place easily using that method.

Knuth both enjoyed diagramming sentences in K-12 and wrote compilers during the summer in university. I believe these facts are probably related.

Sentence diagramming puzzle app on iOS. (Note: Puzzles not an auto-solver).

https://apps.apple.com/au/app/sengram-sentence-diagramming/i...

(FYI: I am the developer).

I learned English that way. I didn’t necessarily could speak it well, but gosh darn it, I knew all the tenses: present perfect, future perfect continuous, etc. Pretty sure most students graduating high school in US have never heard of such silliness.

To be fair, it laid everything out well, and it did help me understand English better.

> I didn’t necessarily could speak it well

This is actually a good example of users of the language adapting it to their needs. "didn't could speak" is not technically correct, but I'm not condemning it. You hear this in some Southern speakers especially, e.g.

"We used to would go to that park"

"That car needs fixed"

"I might could use those verbs correctly.

The more complicated verb tenses in English are pretty damn hard for people, even native speakers. So they adapt.

For the record, the "correct" English would be:

"I couldn't necessarily speak it well" or

"I didn't necessarily learn to speak it well"

> The more complicated verb tenses in English are pretty damn hard for people, even native speakers. So they adapt.

You might hold some consideration that for some people, this is how everyone around them talks. And thus they consider it perfectly acceptable, and it is not a consequence of the language being difficult for them.

> You might hold some consideration

so you're holding that up as snobbery, when it's the exact opposite?

> this is how everyone around them talks

but someone had to start. It didn't just come out of nowhere.

> so you're holding that up as snobbery, when it's the exact opposite?

I've offended you. That was not my intention. My apologies.

> but someone had to start. It didn't just come out of nowhere.

Your statement is painting everyone who talks that way with the same brush. It's unlikely that anyone you encounter who uses those phrases was responsible for coining them.

> painting everyone who talks that way with the same brush.

I don't see what point you're making. Everyone is influenced by the people around them. That's how we have dialects and regional speech patterns. So what?

I actually like those examples I gave. "We might be able to fix that" is certainly a lot more trouble to say than "we might could fix that" and people who say the latter are being a bit creative in their rule-breaking.

someone who expresses 'i might be able to drive' as 'quizás podría manejar' isn't creatively breaking the rules of english. they're speaking spanish. similarly, someone who says 'i might could drive' is not creatively breaking the rules of your dialect of english. they're following the rules of their dialect. you're insisting on treating it as a poor approximation of your own dialect, whether due to creativity or to simple incompetence. that is unbelievably arrogant and thus extremely annoying

double modals have been permitted by the rules of many dialects of american english for decades if not centuries, possibly calqued from scots or german. double modal dialects of english are also common in scotland. there's nothing rule-breaking about 'might could'. 'might could' is probably the absolute most common double modal in american english, so saying 'might could' is no more creative than saying 'eat supper'

https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/multiple-modals and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_modal_auxiliary_verb... has more information. http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/multimo/ is a database of observed uses of the construction, and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... is a recent paper advocating the unorthodox hypothesis that double modals originated independently in american english rather than being imported from scotland

> that is unbelievably arrogant and thus extremely annoying

Do you think maybe you're taking everything just a shade too seriously?

Like, taking offense at a simple expression of preference? Lighten up.

your preferences are fine with me; it's the bigoted cognitions you justify them with that piss me off

What bigoted cognitions are you talking about?

Challenge failed.

the bigotry is in your own mind and you're projecting it onto everyone else.

> but someone had to start. It didn't just come out of nowhere.

Weird grammar often comes from other languages, not from someone making a mistake. Is it possible that West African languages were an influence?

Grammar also often comes from a reanalysis process, involving a stage where what people are saying doesn't change, but how they view the internal structure of what they're saying does.

Well, a lot of modern standard English is made of left-overs from the mistakes people made when they couldn't understand or pronounce the earlier systems.

That's how language evolves.

As a Southerner who would definitely say "I might could…", I would never say “I didn’t necessarily could speak it well”. That’s not how double modals work. (“I used to could…” seems marginally ok to me though.)

Also the “needs fixed” thing is not a Southern dialect property, I associate it more with like Pittsburgh.

I never heard either one in the South OR in Pittsburgh. I have heard them in California, though, which draws people from everywhere.

However, I think there's a Lyle Lovett song that goes "We used to would <verb phrase>."

What I like about it is: you understand it. Although it might strike you as "wrong" and I'd probably never say it myself, let alone write it.

I went to a Catholic grammar school (yes, I guess that's a pun there). We didn't learn any science, but we sure learned our grammar. Including diagramming sentences (I don't remember all those refinements, though). The process is pretty helpful.

I find that book reader to be very unappealing, and for this Fremont Older book, which I'm currently writing about:

https://archive.org/details/myownstory00oldegoog

I downloaded the PDF. I think they should have done that here, too and extracted some actual diagrams.

I learned how to diagram sentences in college. It was eye-opening, and I wish I had learned it sooner.

I plan on going through the book with my soon to be 4th grade son. Hopefully it's a good book.

I remember diagramming being covered once, maybe 5th grade, and not sure it was addressed again.

I seem to have ended up with a very strong "sense" for correct english (though I know some parts where I'm weak; and also my online "post a comment" style stuff ends up full of shorthands...). I presume that my "being good at catching grammatical weirdness" comes from several schoolyears learning German, and being a voracious bookworm as a kid.

Curious if that sort of situation is also the case for others who weren't heavily taught diagramming but still feel they ended up being really good at correct written English.

Defo. I had always had a good implicit knowledge of grammar in my L1, due to early and extensive reading, so synthesising "correct" utterances was never an issue. However, it wasn't until I started learning an L2, and had to explicitly revisit even simple structures, that the light went on and from then on I was able to easily analyse my L1 as well.

I would be interested in the people who did structural/functional diagramming and views to the concrete/solidity of "that's not proper english" or "that isn't how it works" because the other side of the coin is that english (and obviously other languages: Spanish and gender..) change over time, and are fluid against the needs of their speakers.

I guess I'm arguing that if you did training in the formalism of a parse-tree, I wonder if it tends to re-inforce a view in "proper" use of a language rather than it's emergent behaviour and shifts of meaning.

While I'm not a prescriptivist, I think diagramming (and the rest of the strict English grammar education I was given in the 70's and 80's) helped me to understand why grammar rules exist and how they bring clarity to communication. I think that also helped me when learning to write code.

I don't think this applies, particularly. Diagramming wasn't so much "this is how a sentence should be set up" as "this is the function of this word in this sentence."

in the case of the fruit flies and the banana...

There would be two possible diagrams for that sentence, depending on how you understand it.

How about 'The soup that eats like a meal' or a 'pick-pocket'?

You're trying to condemn prescriptivism? What's your point -- some things can't be diagrammed? Who said they could be?

The first one is deliberately "wrong" for advertising effect, like

"Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should." when the correct English is

"Winston tastes good, as a cigarette should."

The ad copywriters liked how it sounded.

> You're trying to condemn prescriptivism?

No, that's a separate discussion. You can use the diagrams for both description and prescription.

> What's your point -- some things can't be diagrammed?

Well, at most that some things can't be diagrammed naively, and perhaps need a more complicated diagram language.

> The first one is deliberately "wrong" for advertising effect, [...]

No, it's perfectly fine. It's called 'middle voice' and is a normal, if relatively rare, feature of English. Your Winston-ad example also seems like your correction makes it less grammatical.

There are subtle parts of how English works that confuse a lot of people, that diagramming might help with. The most obvious to me was the Harry Potter scene where, in the movie, Professor Snape says "and even put a stopper in death" [0]. The book version was just "even stopper death".

These mean opposite things. One uses "stopper" as a noun, saying to prevent death. The other is using it as a verb, saying to bottle up death - create a potion to cause death.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcnWqz8kafo

I don't know if there's an idiom getting in the way, but "put a stopper in" also sounds like bottling to me.

You can diagram AAVE just as easily as standard american english; it just uses a slightly different ruleset.

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