#yet again ancient greek has made me squint harder at english

[sabakos]

I know we all rightfully dunk on English orthography for being horrible but I feel like English grammar is kinda broken in the same way?

Maybe the concept of grammar itself is what's broken, but English grammar rules just seem very... underdetermined? As in, there are actually far fewer "correct" ways of phrasing something than the rules would imply, and making something flow correctly might potentially even require breaking those formal rules, even in "formal" English.

As a native English speaker, I don't consciously think of what these unwritten rules are, but I often find myself applying them when reading my own work or copyediting others. Something like adjective order or which preposition or conjunction will fit in any highly particular context just comes automatically to me, as it does (I think...) to almost any other native speaker, even if we have to knock things around a bit first to find the right arrangement of words. Sometimes there probably are formal grammar rules underlying these somewhat arbitrary seeming decisions, but if so, it seems odd that no one ever had to teach them to me in school, but that instead they taught me a much more simplistic set of rules that don't actually fully describe and even contradict what sounds "right" in regular speech.

It's appealling to think that this is because grammar education itself is somewhat of a farce, and that learning rules isn't as helpful as building intuition. But it could also be that the rules are useful approximations that give a baseline, and that that baseline allows the deeper complexities of sentence structure to more easily come from repeated exposure and use. This whole post could also just be the madness talking, and perhaps I've invented a whole set of arbitrary rules that no one else follows, and maybe even the admission that I'm a native English speaker is news to you all because you actually think my writing style is awkward and stilted, which made you assume that I wasn't. But I think even *that* would probably validate the point I'm aiming at because it would mean that there are unwritten rules that the rest of you all know, and that I'm just bad at them. I don't have words to describe this, or methods that would allow me to investigate it.

What makes me think that this isn't just madness is that I can often identify non-native speakers, even if their English is very good and they follow all of the grammar rules well, because they are consistently worse at the unwritten rules. And even they do follow *some* of these unwritten grammar rules, which is probably a mixture of the repeated exposure they've had to native speakers and that as second language speakers they probably had to learn a broader and more thorough set of rules than I did. Admittedly I do read and write and copyedit more than an average native speaker so it's possible I'm more attuned to the awkwardness, but I suspect this also means other Tumblr people are more likely to know what I'm talking about.

And this isn't mere dialect chauvinism here - Americans, Australians, and Canadians follow the same sets of these rules that British or Irish people do, across both formal and informal registers, with only minor vocab substitutions that don't seem *wrong* to me grammatically so much as unfamiliar. Whereas Euro English speakers and some Indian English speakers seem consistently worse at following these unwritten rules, which I'd attribute to English not being their native language and a resulting lack of exposure to how native speakers use the language.

But without getting too prescriptive, it seems like it should be possible to describe these rules, or possibly restructure grammar education differently, which might help clarify where non-native speakers are going astray if they care to. This is not a problem that needs to be solved for me though, I can understand what most non-native speakers are trying to communicate even if they aren't anywhere near fluent and often even if they break several of the "formal" grammar rules, just perhaps some of them might find it useful? Or possibly it would be maddening and less useful than further exposure, I do suspect that the arbitrary nature of orthography alone has already tried most second-language English learners' patience. So ultimately this is just for my own edification, navel gazing into what makes English composition flow better, I want to know why I think the things about the language that I do and how to speak meaningfully about it with others.