I got to here: "To boldly go, I just split tht infinitive! Those last two rules are carry overs from latin. People just want to make English more like Latin. "
and stopped reading. Let's cover three things.
1) English is beautiful. If you know the history concerning why aspects of the language are so "screwed up," then you can appreciate every "flaw" that seems to exist. It is absolutely marvelous, but to go over every detail would take a semester (or two). Although I do own a good PDF textbook that covers the history of English, if anyone is actually interested in learning...
2) Gender is an artificial label applied by Jacob Grimm when he was characterizing language. Grimm liked to anthropomorphize everything, so we have strong and weak verbs and nouns and adjectives. What makes them "strong" and "weak?" Nothing in particular, really, although a distinct difference does exist, no one would claim the difference was in strength! Rather, his terminology, while imprecise, has become the standard means of discussing language.
In regards to gender being wrong in regards to genitalia, let's look at the Latin nauta. This is a sailor, so masculine by who fills the role, but the noun is feminine. This "error" is rooted in Indo-European history. The -a ending was originally a marker of collectives. Scholars have inferred that female animals were preferred in an agrarian society (which the IE people were), and so the -a ending came to be associated, more or less, with females as the vocabulary expanded. However, the words that were already marked as collectives (nauta, agricola - farmer, poeta - artificer) did not change gender just because the understanding of the -a ending changed. So while gender may be a screwy construct to you, it is 1) artificially assigned by Grimm, and 2) a rich linguistic feature that tells a great deal about how humans developed!
3) The rule to not split infinitives goes back forever and a day. Adam probably said it to Eve in the garden. Old English, in case you were unaware, used to have infinitives that were written as one complete word, like "sweltan," instead of two words, like "to die." This continues into part of Middle English (there are numerous iterations of ME because the language was in such flux), where "sweltan" becomes "swelten." Eventually, this word will come down to us as "to swelter," but hopefully you can see that the infinitive used to be formed more like what you are accustomed to seeing in Latin.
As for when the rule was written down? That may have been an influence of Latin, but as you can hopefully see, it isn't a foreign concept to English. The reason an infinitive shouldn't be split, is because you cannot split an infinitive! But we English-speakers are mighty clever, and so we figured out how to fit the square peg in the round hole and we split that infinitive! We surely did.
Although, it should be mentioned, there are some scholars pushing for allowing the split of the infinitive because it expresses thought better. I disagree that it conveys thought better, but I do think that it allows a wider expression of thought. While "to go boldly" and "to boldly go" seem to have the same meaning, there's a semantic and psychological freight that each carries with it and will be understood slightly differently. (Offhand, "to go boldly" emphasizes the boldly by position, so it's not just boldly, it's really boldly. "To boldly go" emphasizes go by position, so the sentence will probably be understood as going with a boldness that is moderate, but of course larger contexts can provide examples that turn these interpretations on their head.)
I will probably come back later and read beyond the split infinitive remark and offer some more feedback. I hope something of this is helpful and meaningful to each of you that cares about why your first (or second, or third, or fourth) language is seemingly, but isn't, screwed up.
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Looking for Sitter
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