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ON SYNTAX
Imagine a large oak-tree in the favourite landscape of your native country. Its treetop with thousands and thousands of green leaves is glittering in the sun. Its trunk is deeply rooted in the soil of your native land. Now, the image of this powerful tree may be compared to the knowledge of your mother tongue. The green leaves stand for your vocabulary and the robust trunk deeply rooted in the fertile land of yours for the knowledge of the mechanism of your mother tongue. We’re all born with this inherited and subconscious knowledge and already as kids we are able to make difference between Present Tense and Past Tense without even knowing how and why. We rarely make errors in separating, for example, present moment from some event to come. Some of us learn in detail about this in school but some don’t and yet they survive very well. Now if you analyse this subconscious knowledge you will see how abundant it is and how precise it is in terms of time and tense definition. If you go on delving deeper you will find treasure of fine and delicate rules guiding you through the maze of correct spoken or written mother tongue. Since you are able to use in your mother tongue the Present or Past Tense with astounding precision you’ve already been given means of comparison to other languages. People should not be afraid of doing this since this is one of the ways towards strengthening your loose, subconscious knowledge of your own language. By comparing any foreign language to your own language mechanism improve and enlarge the gift you already have been given. It is simply by comparison or elimination that you will build your second language. You cannot miss. Now to arrive at the same or nearly the same precision of syntax in learning a foreign language you can use this tool and discover similarities first and then, of course, differences because, we are all sure, there will be plenty of them. Thus you will be able to add to your precious knowledge of your mother tongue another important facet, that of your foreign language. The knowledge will be stiff and far from being rapidly accessible at first but in time it will grow as efficient and as ready for use. The more you use this method the more rapidly it will be available for you.
Let us quote an example: She knows what I’m talking about. She knew what I was talking about. They are simple aren’t they, but for a student of foreign languages these two phrases may present quite some work. We first have "she" which stands for distinctive female gender and this may well be different than in English. Look at the verb "knows" without forgetting that you have female gender and that this may cause changes in the verb, its form etc. You will have to go on this occasion through the grammar-book of your foreign language and see whether you may use Present Tense or perhaps something else, an infinitive or who knows what. Then again you will have to identify it against the female gender again and then check whether the verb "to know" is in the group of regular or irregular verbs etc. Briefly, you will build your knowledge on the basis of things you have carefully analysed and checked and rechecked. Then you come to the Present Continuous Tense of your mother-tongue "I’m talking" and you know that this tense denotes an action which takes place at the moment of speaking. You may compare it to the rules in your foreign language. Is there anything like Present Continuous Tense? Is there at all a possibility in your foreign language to use Continuous Tense or there is simply Present and nothing else. If there is no Continuous Tense then, I’m afraid, you will have to forget it. Many Slav languages, for example, do not have Present Continuous Tense and instead they use adverbs of time abundantly to make up for the loss. Some languages may not have hard syntax at all, but there is a great possibility that their morphology, female gender and numerous cases like in Latin-oriented languages make it very difficult for an Anglo-Saxon to master it. The author of this text has heard many people talking other languages beside their own. His advice is: watch before you leap. Calculate with precision the curve of your take-off and be sure to ground safely and smoothly. While working as a simultaneous and consecutive interpreter the author has met many ambassadors, royal dignitaries trying to talk Croatian or Serbian in Yugoslavia of the seventies and eighties of the last century. Wise people listen a lot and speak when they are expected or invited to. Once they start then they move along roads they know very well like: Thank you for your warm welcome, It’s been such a pleasure meetin’ you or To promote economic relations with your country we suggest to ... etc. The so-called set-phrases represent a decent platform in all linguistic excursions. But let us get back to our task of building knowledge of grammar for your second language. One of the best mental exercises for students of foreign languages can be found in the conditional tense. By closely analysing the state of affairs in one phrase you will be able to make difference between: If I learn Conditional Tense, I will be able to convey my ideas correctly. If I learnt Conditional Tense, I would be able express myself efficiently. If I had learnt the Conditional Tense, I would have been able to.... Languages of Latin origin have this powerful means of expressing reality, possibility, doubt and unreality. By comparing the Conditional Tense in English, French, Italian to the Conditional Tense in South Slav languages you may see that almost all the potentials of the reality condition, doubt or unreality may be conveyed successfully. The only difference, perhaps, would be that Past Perfect Tense in South Slav languages which tends to be replaced by Simple Past. To tell you the secret: Past Perfect Tense disappeared from these languages long time ago and the unreality may very well be conveyed by using Simple Past Tense. Perhaps you will economise on Past Perfect in South Slav languages but when it comes to nouns and their gender, then an Anglo- -Saxon student is expected to have slight problems. But this problem may be by-passed by a set of rules prescribed by grammarians to facilitate the study thereof. Let us summarise:We all dispose of inherited language and syntax potential. Our study of any foreign language may be made easier to a great extent by simply comparing rules from the foreign language to the rules in our mother tongue. We establish similarities, mark the differences and absorb them profoundly attaching them as it were to the mechanism of our first language. Comparison will clearly indicate to us what aspects of time and tense definition should be expanded and what aspects neglected or even abandoned. All this with a purpose of assimilating profoundly the workings of a foreign language in order to be able to use it efficiently and readily.
D.J.