have more than three. Other inconsistencies simply were ignored as being irrel-
evant to the larger goal of preparing students for Latin.
Although American schools have not taught Latin for decades, traditional
grammar continues to try to match English grammar to Latin. Virtually all
current handbooks, for example, propose that English has at least three
tenses. Most take an inexplicable additional step: Rather than exploring as-
pect, they instead treat progressive and perfect forms as tenses. They describe
thepast progressive tense,thepresent progressive tense,thefuture progres-
sive tense,and so on. In these accounts, English has anywhere from 9 to 16
tenses, depending on the text.
Views on traditional grammar began to change toward the end of the 19th
century, and much of the motivation for this change was the result of interest in
American Indian tribal languages. Native Americans largely had been ignored
after the great Indian wars, but they became the focus of much scholarly atten-
tion when anthropologists began perceiving that the distinctive characteristics
of these indigenous people were vanishing. An intensive preservation program
started, and researchers such as Franz Boas began efforts to record the details of
the tribal cultures, particularly their languages.
A few early missionaries had produced some records of these languages, but
they were not systematic and lacked the rigor necessary to preserve the languages
for the future. In addition, these missionaries used traditional grammar in their
efforts, with less than satisfactory results. In his introduction to theHandbook of
American Indian Languages,Boas (1911) lamented the fact that the descriptions
were distorted by the attempt to impose traditional grammar on languages for
which it was inappropriate. Trying to get these languages to fit traditional gram-
mar was the linguistic equivalent of forcing a round peg into a square hole.
Tense again provides an interesting illustration. Many Indian languages
have only one tense, usually the present, yet they were described as though they
have three tenses, like Latin. In some cases, to ensure that the description was
congruent with the Latin model, those describing the languages would produce
a construction that did not naturally occur among native speakers. These were
instances in which the grammar drove the language to such an extent that the
finished description did not reflect the way people used the language. As more
data were collected, the number of such incompatibilities grew, and researchers
were at a loss. When confronted with different dialects of the same language,
they could not decide which was “correct” because there was no standard by
which to make a judgment. There were no texts, and the number of native
speakers was shrinking rapidly, making it difficult to locate an informant who
could offer advice. Eventually, scholars like Boas concluded that the goal of
traditional grammar, prescription based on a literary model, was inadequate.
98 CHAPTER 4