Re[2]: [tied] az+

At 1:02:23 PM on Wednesday, July 9, 2003, fortuna11111
wrote:

>> You may speak a language very well but know nothing
>> _about_ it, have no idea where it comes from, what it's
>> related to, etc.

> In speaking foreign languages, which you had to learn in a
> non-native-speaking context at the very beginning, it is
> hardly so.

It can be. Acquisition of fluency and good usage does not
depend on knowledge of a language's history or external
relationships, either for a native speaker or for someone
learning a second language.

>> Most native speakers of any language are blissfully
>> ignorant of such stuff, just as they don't give a damn
>> about the difference between a pronoun and a preposition.

> I was not talking about native speakers exclusively. But I
> do not think a Bulgarian who makes good use of the
> Bulgarian language in writing and speaking would be
> ignorant of grammar.

I suspect that you're confusing two kinds of grammatical
knowledge. A fluent native speaker who uses the language
well obviously 'knows' the grammar in a functional sense,
but he needn't have any knowledge of grammatical terminology
or theory.

Brian