I remember being taught something about English grammar when I was at primary school. It wasn’t as much as my Spanish teacher at secondary school would have liked, however. She berated the whole class for not knowing what the subjunctive mood was. To be fair, it wasn’t really our fault: English doesn’t really have a subjunctive any more, apart from in the expression if I were you…. Latin introduced me to a whole load more verb forms and noun forms that I never knew existed. Some languages seemed to have so much more interesting word forms than English.
Later, as I moved around the country for education and work purposes, I became interested in how my dialect was affected by those around me. I studied linguistics formally, and became more interested in theoretical linguistics, particularly morphology, the study of all those interesting word forms.
I am still in mourning over the loss of all my lovely language and linguistics books.
