6 ms·

Diagraming sentences in the 19th century

74 points by benbreen 2y ago

garcia3252 2y ago
[flagged]
GeekyBear 2y ago
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.
AlbertCory 2y ago
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 https://archive.org/details/myownstory00oldegoog I downloaded the PDF. I think they should have done that here, too and extracted some actual diagrams.
- dwhitney 2y ago
  I learned how to diagram sentences in college. It was eye-opening, and I wish I had learned it sooner.
  - bluSCALE4 2y ago
    I plan on going through the book with my soon to be 4th grade son. Hopefully it's a good book.
  - gertlex 2y ago
    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.
    - 082349872349872 2y ago
      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.
082349872349872 2y ago
Knuth both enjoyed diagramming sentences in K-12 and wrote compilers during the summer in university. I believe these facts are probably related.
rdtsc 2y ago
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.
- AlbertCory 2y ago
  > 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"
  - drdec 2y ago
    > 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.
    - AlbertCory 2y ago
      > 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.
      - drdec 2y ago
        > 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.
ggm 2y ago
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.
- paulmooreparks 2y ago
  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.
- AlbertCory 2y ago
  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."
  - ggm 2y ago
    in the case of the fruit flies and the banana...
    - AlbertCory 2y ago
      There would be two possible diagrams for that sentence, depending on how you understand it.
      - eru 2y ago
        How about 'The soup that eats like a meal' or a 'pick-pocket'?
tkgally 2y ago
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.
soferio 2y ago
Sentence diagramming puzzle app on iOS. (Note: Puzzles not an auto-solver). https://apps.apple.com/au/app/sengram-sentence-diagramming/id512943810 https://apps.apple.com/au/app/sengram-sentence-diagramming/i... (FYI: I am the developer).

74 points by benbreen 2y ago

[flagged]

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.

AlbertCory 2y ago

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 https://archive.org/details/myownstory00oldegoog I downloaded the PDF. I think they should have done that here, too and extracted some actual diagrams.

dwhitney 2y ago
I learned how to diagram sentences in college. It was eye-opening, and I wish I had learned it sooner.
- bluSCALE4 2y ago
  I plan on going through the book with my soon to be 4th grade son. Hopefully it's a good book.
- gertlex 2y ago
  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.
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    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.

082349872349872 2y ago

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

rdtsc 2y ago

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.

AlbertCory 2y ago
> 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"
- drdec 2y ago
  > 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.
  - AlbertCory 2y ago
    > 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.
    - drdec 2y ago
      > 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.

ggm 2y ago

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.

paulmooreparks 2y ago
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.
AlbertCory 2y ago
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."
- ggm 2y ago
  in the case of the fruit flies and the banana...
  - AlbertCory 2y ago
    There would be two possible diagrams for that sentence, depending on how you understand it.
    - eru 2y ago
      How about 'The soup that eats like a meal' or a 'pick-pocket'?

tkgally 2y ago

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.

soferio 2y ago

Sentence diagramming puzzle app on iOS. (Note: Puzzles not an auto-solver). https://apps.apple.com/au/app/sengram-sentence-diagramming/id512943810 https://apps.apple.com/au/app/sengram-sentence-diagramming/i... (FYI: I am the developer).