Languages and Linguistics

but on rereading I can see where confusion might arise. Typically, at least the way I was taught, dependent clauses support the adjacent noun/clause, in this case "...the Greek classics." But then, these rules don't count for as much as they did when I was in grammar class. (That's both a poorly veiled commentary on the degradation of grammar and an admission that the rest of the world is not English class.)

To the point, I know that Latin and Greek remained a part of a regular - if not required - Harvard education, for instance, into at least the beginning of the 1950s. I cannot speak with the same certainty much beyond that, so I hedged my bets. You seem to have hooked into the hedge. I know that Greek and Latin continued to be taught in higher secondary schools in parts of Europe (Belgium and The Netherlands for sure) well into the 1960s, with the changes you mention taking hold in the 1970s.

'Inflected": for clarity, I should have used 'influenced,' as it probably would have raised fewer hackles. But 'inflected' does a non-linguistic denotation, in the sense of bending or turning from a course, e.g., the path of an object flying in space passing through the gravity well of the earth would be inflected towards earth. That's a clumsy example, but the usage is true enough. I meant in the sense of "pure" English (whatever the the nine hells that is) was inflected towards Greek rhetorical, not grammatical, structures. Old English (and Saxon and OHG or OI, for that matter) have very different rhetorical structures. Modern English's rhetoric has been inflected, turned towards, the Greek through the layering of "classical" literature since, what, their "rediscovery" Renaissance? I don't know enough about the linguistic collision of Old English and French post-Hastings to be able to say there were no similar influences from OF prior.

I'm using more " than I like in the hopes that I won't be derided for claiming there is a pure English (there isn't), that classical (epoch-wise) literature was ever lost (it wasn't), etc.