Words Matter 0
During the time that English grammar was becoming a study, Latin was the language of the educated. I did not understand English grammar until I took two years of Latin, as traditional English grammar is based on trying to squeeze English into the Latin model. It has always been an uneasy fit, as English is fundamentally a language of word order and Latin an inflected language.
(The spurious injunction to never split an infinitive is a bastard offspring of that process, as Latin infinitives are single words and ipso facto cannot be split.)
For example, consider the ablative absolute.
