The notion of “appropriateness” of analytic categories for a particular language has not always been a consideration. In traditional grammar books, tables such as the 84 The Study of Language following were often presented for English verbs, constructed by analogy with similar tables of forms in Latin grammars. The forms for the Latin verb amare (“to love”) are listed on the right.

Each of the Latin verb forms is different, according to the categories of person and number, yet the English verb forms are (with one exception) mostly the same. Thus it makes sense, in describing a language such as Latin, to have all those descriptive categories to characterize verb forms, but they don’t really describe verb forms in English. In English, it makes more sense to say the categories describe different pronouns. The influence of Latin, however, goes beyond the types of descriptive labels.