# 第六章 语法

## 1. 没文化的人才讨厌语法

没文化的人才讨厌语法——这话好像说得重了一点，但却只不过是事实。经常有人以各种各样的理由宣扬“不学语法也可以”，并且常常能因此获得追捧，但这只不过是疯子骗傻子而已，本质上来看一群没文化的人在集体意淫。去市场买菜，确实不需要懂语法，因为说的全都是短句、断句：

> 甲：多少钱一斤？<br />
> 乙：两块二。<br />
> 甲：贵。<br />
> 乙：不贵！买多了给你抹点……<br />
> 甲：行，来两斤。<br />
> 乙：两斤三两，行么？<br />
> 甲：行。<br />
> 乙：零头抹了，算五块钱……<br />
> 甲：嗯，谢谢。<br />
> 乙：好嘞！<br />

可这只是我们学习语言文字的目的不仅仅是为了在这种场合说说话而已吧？稍微复杂一点的思考结果就面临一定的表达难度——连语法都不过关，又如何清楚表达？而那些有思想的人用语言表达他们的思想之时，阅读者语法不过关，理解上就必然南辕北辙。

商务印书馆是个相当不错的出版社，然而也经常令人难过。比如，米尔顿•弗里德曼的（Milton Friedman）的《货币的祸害：货币史片段》一书中有一句译文是这样的：

> 货币是不能拿来开玩笑的，所以要交给中央银行。

熟悉弗里德曼的观点的人会吓一跳，“啊？老爷子什么时候改变看法了？！”

可原文是这样的（这是Friedman引用Georges Clemenceau的话）：

![](images/figure52.png)

– image extracted from [Google Books search results](http://is.gd/6hMzX)

仅仅是因为“too…to”的结构前面多了一个“much”译者就给翻译错了，语法功底太差。而事实上，译者翻译完了一本书（为了翻译，必须“研读”——比“精读”、“通读”、“泛读”都要仔细），可是竟然完全没看懂书的内容。所以，根本就没看出这句话和整本书的内容之间的矛盾……这不是没文化是什么？

原本这世界应该有所分工，据说，社会大分工带来了前所未有的生产力提升。要是让那些有天分学习外语的人学好外语专职做好翻译，那么另外一些没有学习外语天分、却有其他天分的人就可以做一些他们擅长干的事情——然后大家相互使用货币进行交换活动，社会效益会大幅度增加。可惜啊可惜。很多的时候，我们即便没有天分，也要咬着牙学好外语，要么实在是太吃亏了。

如果有机会接触各个文化的人就都知道了：其实，地球上任何一个文化的人群都一样，大部分的人讨厌甚至憎恨语法学习。许多年前，英国人在他们的语文课上要花费大量的时间精力教学生所谓“Parsing”的语法分析方法，可是现在却因所谓“现代教育改革”（其实只不过是和过往任何一次该领域中的改革一样 “过大于功”的另外一次“改变”而已）而被弃用：

> **Parsing**: Lost art of identifying all the components of a text, and once one of the fundamental exercises that tested and informed pupils in English. To parse a phrase such as ‘man bites dog’ involves noting that the singular noun ‘man’ is the subject of the sentence, the verb ‘bites’ is the third person singular of the present tense of the verb to bite, and the singular noun ‘dog’ is the object of the sentence.
	
> – Dictionary of Modern English Grammar, by Ned Halley, Wordsworth, 2005

这种基础语言训练是否像那些“新锐改革派”们所认为的那样一无是处乃至于必须废弃呢？才不是呢。事实上，这些所谓的改革者尽管愚蠢但在历史进程中却属于“成功者”，因为他们“竟然”用不合理战胜了合理。其实也没啥可奇怪的，傻蛋总是可以“成功”地把世界变坏，这种例子随处可见，因为傻蛋最容易找到（众多）同伴，也因此在投票活动中最可能成为大多数……他们最常挂在嘴边上的话是套用这个句型的：“……要不然怎么大家都……？”——尽管使用这个句型的句子有时候也确实有道理。

## 2. 无论如何都要学语法

于1953年获得诺贝尔文学奖的英国首相[Winston Churchill](http://www.winstonchurchill.org/)曾如此描述他儿时的这种语言训练对他来讲究竟有多么重要：

> By being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that. But I was taught English. We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English. Mr. Somervell — a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great — was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing–namely, to write mere English. He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. Not only did we learn English parsing thoroughly, but we also practised continually English analysis. Mr. Somervell had a system of his own. He took a fairly long sentence and broke it up into its components by means of black, red, blue, and green inks. Subject, verb, object: Relative Clauses, Conditional Clauses, Conjunctive and Disjunctive Clauses! Each had its colour and its bracket. It was a kind of drill. We did it almost daily. As I remained in the Third Form three times as long as anyone else, I had three times as much of it. I learned it thoroughly. Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence — which is a noble thing. And when in after years my schoolfellows who had won prizes and distinction for writing such beautiful Latin poetry and pithy Greek epigrams had to come down again to common English, to earn their living or make their way, I did not feel myself at any disadvantage. Naturally I am biased in favor of boys learning English. I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat. But the only thing I would whip them for is not knowing English, I would whip them hard for that.

> – My Early Life: A Roving Commission, Thornton Butterworth [UK] and Charles Scribner’s Sons [US], 1930)

而美国总统Abraham Lincoln也非常重视语法。 林肯没上过几年学，然而却深信上帝给了他一个使命要他完成。（人群中总是有一些人——绝非多数——存在这种古怪的直觉，不管他们有没有宗教信仰。比如中文作家王朔就曾经如此写道：“我知道我是有来历的，走在芸芸众生中这种感觉尤为强烈……”我猜这不是王朔在装蛋，他只是很多拥有这种古怪直觉的人之一而已。）

![](images/figure53.png)

为了成为一个有影响力的公众人物，林肯经常要步行很久去参加William Mentor Graham的演讲培训。可是林肯却长期进步缓慢，表现欠佳。还好林肯悟性不错，意识到语法的重要：

> “Spoke to me one day and said: ‘I had a notion of studying grammar‘, recalled Graham. “There was none in the village and I said to him: ‘I know of a grammar at one Vance’s (a man named John Vance), about six miles. Got up and went on foot to Vance’s and got the book. He soon came back and told me he had it. He then turned his immediate and almost undivided attention to English grammar. The book was Kirkham’s Grammar, an old (1826) volume.”

> – “My Childhood’s Home” Growing Up With Young Abe Lincoln, by Richard Kigel

![](images/figure54.png)

– image from [American Treasures of the Library of Congress](http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trr132.html)

而林肯也发现很多人的思维混乱和语法欠佳有着紧密的联系：

> Monday, [April] 24th

> On Saturday last we had General Rosecrans before our committee, and his account of the campaign of Western Virginia makes McClellan look meaner than ever. On last Friday went with Indianans to call on President Johnson. Governor Morton transgressed the proprieties by reading a carefully prepared essay on the subject of reconstruction. Johnson entered upon the same theme, indulging in bad grammar, bad pronunciation and much incoherency of thought. In common with many I was mortified.

> – Lincoln the Lover: III. The Tragedy, Wilma Frances Minor

可为什么这么重要的东西竟然招来大多数人的厌烦甚至憎恨呢？也许是因为语法学习很难看到直接受益。人们大多不喜欢不直接的东西。根源又在于人天生短视。这并不丢人，因为这是基因决定的：

> the evolutionary costs and benefits of innovations work like the economics of pharmaceutical research. The Pfizer Corporation spent over $I00 million and many years developing the drug Viagra before the drug made a single cent of profit. The costs accumulated early, and the benefits came only later. Drug companies can cope with this delayed gratification, and have the foresight to undertake the research that leads to such profitable innovations. But evolution has no foresight. It lacks the long-term vision of drug company management. A species can’t raise venture capital to pay its bills while its research team tries to turn an innovative idea into a market-dominating biological product. Each species has to stay biologically profitable every generation, or else it goes extinct.

> – The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, by Geoffrey Miller, ANCHOR BOOKS 2000

因为短视其实是人类的本性，所以，我们总是不由自主地被它所左右。人们学骑自行车比学语法快，并不仅仅是因为语法更为复杂，还可能更是因为骑自行车很快就能学会，而后就可以马上体会到各种便捷；而学习语法不仅单调枯燥、耗时费力，而且最要命的是总是觉得“不知道学它究竟有什么用？”这个问题，是很多人放弃学习的根本原因——我在《把时间当作朋友》里有详尽的论述。

丘吉尔，不仅语法功底扎实，据说词汇量也是现代人中最大的。据说他所使用过的词汇（含文稿和讲演稿）总计超过六万个，而大多数普通人能够熟练使用的词汇，书面语中最多两万个左右，而口语中不过区区五千个左右。可是丘吉尔也并不是完人：

> If one were looking for an iconic image of the Second World War that summed up Allied pluck and derring-do it would have to be that of Winston Churchill with index and middle finger raised in a defiant ‘V’ for “Victory” sign. Revered for his strength of character and his willful defiance of Nazi Germany when Britain stood alone against the Third Reich, Winston Churchill is cherished throughout the world as one of the war’s most heroic figures. His legacy during one of the darkest eras in human history paints a portrait of the man as a wonderful, larger-than-life personality—a characterization that overshadows his faults and shortcomings in those crucial years. But those faults and shortcomings had a devastating legacy of their own. Winston Churchill: The Flawed Genius of World War II examines the decisions and policies Churchill made in the vital months between June 1940 and December 1941 that prolonged the war, allowed for millions of casualties, and left half of Europe behind the Iron Curtain. In 1941 Britain was waging a successful campaign against Italy in North Africa. General O’Connor could in fact have beaten them altogether and thereby prevented Rommel and his army from even landing. However, Churchill made the fatal decision to switch key British and Commonwealth divisions from North Africa to Greece in order to defend that country from German invasion, a heroic but guaranteed-to-fail gesture, and fail it did. When the United States entered the war, George Marshall’s victory plan was to launch an invasion of the Continent—what would become operation Overlord—early in 1943 and force a direct engagement of the enemy. But Churchill’s decision to remove troops to Greece stalled Britain’s victory in North Africa and enabled Rommel and his crack Afrika Korps to gain a foothold. Now Churchill urged Roosevelt to help beleaguered British troops in the African desert and that meant diverting troops from Marshall’s victory plan. It made landing in northwestern Europe entirely impossible, and D-day, the main objective of attacking Germany directly, through France, was postponed until June 1944. As a result, by the time the Allies landed in Normandy, Soviet troops were further west than they would have been in 1943. In that crucial year, millions of civilians—Jewish, Russian, Polish, and German—died who might have lived. By the war’s end Stalin had already eclipsed half of Europe. Had D-day been earlier the Iron Curtain may have fallen with very different and diminished borders and millions of Central Europeans could have lived in freedom from 1945-1989. While Churchill’s was only one player in the drama that allowed this calamity to happen, Christopher Catherwood contends that it certainly tarnished the legacy of his “finest hour.”

> – Winston Churchill: The Flawed Genius of WWII by Christopher Catherwood

在精彩演讲、大众影响力方面同等杰出优秀的是另外一位被称为恶魔的家伙，希特勒。可是希特勒的语法要多差就有多差：

> In August 1908, Hitler wrote a letter to Gustl that makes plain his mediocre success in mastering the most elementary usages of German spelling and grammar, not to mention any coherent subject matter. The handwriting is childish, two words are scratched out and written over, other words are misspelled, punctuation is haphazard, and the style is rambling and disconnected. German spelling does not present the same kind of difficulty to the young student that English does. No vestigial spellings like though, touch, read, colonel, psalm, and such exist in German, which is spelled with dependable regularity. For young Hitler, however, the German language was mined with booby traps. The spelling in his letter is often erratic: dann becomes dan, sofort becomes soffort, Katarrh is spelled chartar, dies is spelled with two s’s, and so on. His use of capitals in this correspondence is also unpredictable.* Punctuation is omitted. In the August letter, as in others, he never used a question mark. He asks “Who really published the newspaper I sent you last time” without a question mark. In the sentence “Have you read the last decisions of the municipal council in connection with the new Teater,” Theater is spelled without the h, which is part of the German as well as the English word, and again the sentence ends without a question mark. So does the following sentence: “Do you know any details.” The pronoun sie, meaning either “they” or “she,” is not capitalized in German usage, although Sie, the formal pronoun meaning “you,” is. Hitler, however, capitalizes sie for “they” and for “she,” just as he haphazardly capitalizes other pronouns that should be lowereased. Words are hopelessly run togetherin one case seven of them, to make one long misspelled and inchoate formulation.

> – The Making of Adolf Hitler: The Birth and Rise of Nazism by Davidson, Eugene.

正如有人就是五音不全唱歌跑调一样，我想肯定有些人对语法也存在类似的障碍吧？正如五音不全的人无论怎么努力也不可能唱出天籁之音，我们却不能因此不允许他K歌一样，有些人认真学习语法了却总也不能学的很好，那又怎么样呢？我们不应该因此就嘲弄他，也没什么权利因此就禁止他说话写字吧？某种意义上，使用文字跟K歌也差不多，有些时候关键并不在于说得写得多好，而在于说得写得究竟有多投入。

## 3. 阻碍语法学习的幻觉——“那我没学中文语法不一样样能用好中文么？”

拒绝学习等于拒绝进化。用个不太恰当的类比来说，拒绝学习的人就好像是甘心永远做猴子而不想进化成人一样。然而，很多人拒绝进化往往是因为他们认为自己有足够合理的理由。比如，很多人拒绝学习英语语法的时候，常常用这样的一个貌似无法反驳的理由：

> 那你看我根本就没有学过中文语法，那不也一样用得好好的么！所以说啊，语法这东西没用，学它干脆就是浪费时间！

果真如此么？

其实，还有比这更为夸张的例子他们没有想到：哪怕不识字的文盲（他们当然没有学过语法）在使用母语的时候也几乎没有病句。然而这并不能证明语法没用。即便是不识字的文盲，也身处一个母语环境，身边的人都在说正确的句子。语言学习的最基本手段就是模仿，你说什么，我就跟着说什么，准没错——而事实上，我们说的话之中，几乎99.9%是在重复我们曾经听到的、看到的句子。所以，即便是文盲，也不可能每一句话都是病句。不过，显而易见的另外一个事实是文盲通常说的话都是表达简单思想的，用得都是简单词汇、简单句型，这也从另外一个方面降低了他们犯错的可能性。

顺带说，这也是我为什么极力反对学生跑到所谓的“英语角”去“学英语”的根本原因。因为在英语角里，大多数人所说的并不是真正正确的英文，而更可能是“原创英文”。一方面身边的人都在说不正确的句子，另外一方面自己又坚决不学语法，不是找死是什么？有人孤独求败，英语角里可好，是集体自杀——竟然还都以为在联欢……

很多人认为自己“没学过语法不也一样可以熟练使用母语么？”，实际上主要是因为他们不由自主地高估了自己。

> 人们特别容易高估自己，绝大多数成年人对自己的母语水平过度自信。他们以为自己的母语水平很高，却忘了另外一个事实：很可能他们的母语水平仅仅处在对母语使用者来说只不过是够格的级别上。只不过，大多数成年人从学校毕业之后（按照我们的教育体系教学内容设置来看，更可能是高中毕业之后）不再被强制参加各种语文考试，不再有机会因考试成绩差而自卑，于是自然而然地认为自己的语文水准已经“相当高”——“总比中学生强吧？”他们这样想，可事实上还真的不见得。多少本科毕业生（甚至包括相当部分的研究生、博士）走入社会之后，竟然写不出一份像样的租房合同，或者竟然不能够完全读懂自己所签写的雇佣协议。很多人听人讲话、读人文章之后常常断章取义，其实并非出自故意，只不过是文字理解水平太差乃至于经常“听不到”、“看不到”一些重要内容而已。不妨想像一下，绝大多数人（这个比例绝对会超过99%）无论多么认真地写一篇文稿，无论自己反复修改过多少次，能够正式出版之前，拿到编辑手里之后“一字都不需改动”的可能性几乎是零——更可能的存在着一些有意无意的错别字、或隐蔽或明显的语法错误、自以为是的表达等等，往往需要另外一个人反复推敲才行。很多人忽视母语的修炼，像鸵鸟遇到危险时只顾着把头埋起来一样一头扎到英语学习中去，其实不见得是有意而为之，更深层次的原因很可能仅仅是对自己母语水平的错误估计。


大多数人的母语语法实际上并不及格，只不过他们已经从学校毕业，就因此认为自己已经“过关”了。教育体系注定失败的重要原因之一就在于每一个科目都要人为地设置一个100分的标准之后再设定个60分的及格线，而完全不顾那标准事实上有多么荒唐。数学 100分的学生真的就100%掌握了数学知识么？英语60分的学生真的就掌握了所有英语知识的60%么？满分100分的语文考试一贯只能得个八九十分的大多数人，难道就真的一毕业就“自动合格”了么？

而另外一方面，他们在高估了自己的同时，又降低了标准。他们一不小心就把“熟练使用母语”自动降低到“能够用母语熟练地进行日常交流”的水平上——菜市场上的流利与熟练和正式场合中的流利与熟练根本不是一回事。一旦想写文章给别人读、或者当众讲话给
