Letter: A living language

Sir: Three cheers for Philip Hensher's "I'm bored of pedantic grammarians" (Review, 25 June).

I'd be a bit careful though about such sweeping statements as " the whole history of the English language is a history of the simplification of grammatical structures": there is a tendency for English speakers to identify grammatical complexity with grammatical inflexion. In fact modern English has developed some pretty complex grammatical structures - in the field of auxiliary verbs, for example.

Also, the dropping of the plural inflexion after number words can hardly be called a simplification since it complicates the general "if there's more than one add the inflexion" rule.

And I must say the "bored of..." phenomenon is new to me: I mustn't have been keeping my ears open.

MALCOLM JACKSON

London SE22