It may be that using a well-established grammatical description of Latin is a useful guide for some European languages (e.g. Italian or Spanish), is less useful for others (e.g. English), and may be absolutely misleading if you are trying to describe some non-European languages. This last point became clear to those linguists who were trying to describe the structure of the native languages of North America toward the end of the nineteenth century. The categories and rules that were appropriate for Latin grammar just did not seem to fit these languages. As a consequence, for most of the twentieth century, a rather different approach was adopted. Analysts collected samples of the language they were interested in and attempted to describe the regular 86 The Study of Language structures of the language as it was used, not according to some view of how it should be used. This is called the descriptive approach.