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LINGUIST List 16.3527

Tue Dec 13 2005

Qs: Fidditch; Source of Leonard Bloomfield Quote

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Directory
        1.    Pius ten Hacken, Fidditch
         2.    Keith Allan, Source of Leonard Bloomfield Quote
Message 1: Fidditch
Date: 12-Dec-2005
From: Pius ten Hacken <p.ten-hackenswansea.ac.uk>
Subject: Fidditch


In his ''Two Models of Grammatical Description'' (Word 10 (1954) 210-231),
Charles Hockett writes:

''The description must also be prescriptive, not of course in the Fidditch
sense, but in the sense that by following the statements one must be able
to generate any number of utterances in the language, above and beyond
those observed in advance by the analyst—new utterances most, if not all,
of which will pass the test of casual acceptance by a native speaker.”

Could anyone give me some background about the expression ''Fidditch''? Is
this a real person, a fictional character or something else? Any
information greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Pius ten Hacken

Linguistic Field(s): History of Linguistics
Message 2: Source of Leonard Bloomfield Quote
Date: 12-Dec-2005
From: Keith Allan <Keith.Allanarts.monash.edu.au>
Subject: Source of Leonard Bloomfield Quote


Can anyone tell me where I got the following Bloomfield quote from? To
my shame all I had written down was 'Bloomfield 1933', but I can find no
trace of it in 'Language'.

"The physical (acoustic) definition of each phoneme of any given dialect
can be expected to come from the laboratory within the next decades."

I wait with bated breath and crossed fingers.

Keith Allan
Linguistics Program, LCL, Monash University,
Australia

Linguistic Field(s): Phonetics


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