Linguistics (cont.)
A side effect of all this radical change and ferment is that our standard textbooks and classroom grammars are becomingly increasingly obsolete and unhitched from the current state of our technical knowledge and understanding of language. For instance, the Latin grammars of Allen & Greenough and Gildersleeve & Lodge were both first published around the time of the Franco-Prussian War, and the editions we use today are still over a century old. Things have got way beyond the point where we could pretend that twentieth-century theoretical linguistics was, as Blackadder said of the Renaissance, 'just something that happened to somebody else.' That is why the Stanford first-year graduate program includes an integrated theoretical linguistic component, covering basic topics in syntax and semantics that are relevant for the everyday activities of the Classical scholar, particularly language instruction and the elicitation of textual meaning. We also hoped that aiming for a deeper level of understanding might make grammar more interesting to study, even fun.
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