En réponse à Andreas Johansson :


>* This is not a rhetorical question. I am genuinely curious as to why you
>apparently see a need for primary schools to teach kids how to analyze
>sentences in their native language.

Because that's the only way to make them able to reliably and consistently 
build and understand complex sentences in their own language. I remember 
reading the results of a survey that proved that illiteracy was caused in 
part by a lack of teaching the basic analytic tools necessary to analyse 
sentences in one's native tongue. It was in dead tree form, so I don't have 
a link to it (nor do I have it here). Note that I'm referring to illiteracy 
here (the inability to understand texts of medium to high complexity), not 
analphabetism, which has other causes.

If your goal is just to allow all children to write SMS messages on their 
mobiles, then you're right that this is unnecessary. I personally think 
literacy should be a little higher than that.

>** Granted, both make a nom-obl distinction in pronoun, but it's practically
>identical in the two languages, and so represents no problem.

I was lucky to know how all those concepts when I started learning English. 
The structure of the English sentence is different enough from the 
structure of the French sentence that being able to fall back on a 
structured system of analysis helped me learning much faster. Even with 
languages I learned later, it helped: for instance, I am better at writing 
Dutch than my friend, who is a native Dutchman. I make more spelling 
mistakes than him and my vocabulary is limited (and I constantly confuse 
genders), but my sentences are usually better built than his, and when it 
comes to grammatical rules I'm much better at expressing them than he is, 
and thus much better at *using* them.

But learning foreign languages isn't the main reason for learning simple 
grammatical concepts, as all those things I've been describing apply to 
your native language as well, especially in a literate civilisation like ours.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.