Learn this from me

(This has been in drafts for a long time. In lieu of something new, I finished it up.)

Over at his blog You Don't Say, Baltimore Sun copyeditor John McIntyre discusses often usage nuances; this is one of his examples:

My wife grew up in Columbus, Ohio, where she was mystified in English class to be taught that to learn is an intransitive verb. Who, she wondered, would get that wrong? But I grew up in eastern Kentucky, where there was a supply of bullies ever willing to learn me not to give myself such airs as a bookworm. Learn as a transitive has a long history in English, probably surviving in Appalachia as a remnant of the 18th-century English of the first Scotch-Irish settlers. But no one heard that usage coming from my mouth, because it would have identified me as subliterate.

Excuse me, Mr McIntyre, but "learn" is definitely a transitive verb. "I learn grammar", for instance.

I believe he means that "learn" is not a ditransitive verb, and that it's semantically restricted from taking the learner as its object. Of course, that's harder to work into a throwaway comment about regionalisms, isn't it? Still, it's true. "Learn" is most definitely not an intransitive verb.

"Learn" takes a pretty full range of complements: it can take noun phrases as a direct object (learn your lesson); it can take infinitive or participial clauses as its complement (learn to play golf, learn reading music); it can even take full clauses, with or without the complementizer "that" (learn that Bob is coming home next week, learn what to do in case of emergency, learn Sue doesn't know how to work the copier) . "Teach" has almost the same range - direct objects, infinitive clauses, and participial clauses are fine (teach math; teach to read Spanish; teach playing the guitar), but with other clauses it really needs the overt "that" - and the indirect object (teach you that you can succeed). It can always have a noun phrase indirect object with a noun phrase, either plain or with "to" (teach Bob math, teach math to Bob) and the plain one with an infinitive clause (a structure that mimics a direct object: teach Bob to play golf = teach [playing] golf to Bob), while learn can only have a prepositional phrase in the reciprocal position. Given the different semantic, or case, roles the verbs require, for "teach" that preposition is generally "from", since prepositions are how we show what case endings used to; but differing semantic roles or not, there's no denying that "learn" is transitive.

This semantic restriction, by the way, is (as he points out) a relatively recent development; the use of "learn" to mean "teach" is not a substandard innovation, it is a throwback (substandard now, to be sure) to the original usage, which is seen in most IndoEuropean languages, in which the same verb is used for both 'directions' of learning. English's loss of pronomial inflections made the distinction (learn + dative = teach; learn + genitive = learn, as we still see in "learn from someone"). Semantically, of course, the distinction survives; only when you fill the object slot with a proper noun (teach/learn Shakespeare, or - a better example - teach/learn Steven King) is there confusion. I'm not at all surprised that the new usage has to be taught.

But I am surprised that McIntyre thinks "learn" is intransitive. (Or maybe that he doesn't know what "intransitive" means?) And I hope that Mrs McIntyre wasn't really taught that it is.