Wednesday, August 21, 2024
The Forest of Syntax
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), "The Teaching of Latin: A New Approach," The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement and Other Posthumous Essays on Literature, Religion and Language (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2006), pp. 177-199 (at 181):
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The mighty forest of syntax opened up its glades to exploration, adorned with its three monumental trees—the sturdy Accusative and Infinitive, the graceful Ablative Absolute, and the banyan-like and proliferating Ut and the Subjunctive. Beneath their roots lurked a horrid scrubby tangle of words beginning with u, q and n, and a nasty rabbit-warren of prepositions. There was also a horrid region, beset with pitfalls and mantraps, called Oratio Obliqua, into which one never entered without a shudder, and where, starting off from a simple Accusative and Infinitive, one tripped over sprawling dependent clauses and bogged one’s self down in the consecution of tenses, till one fell over a steep precipice into a Pluperfect Subjunctive, and was seen no more.
