LINGUIST List 5.1328

Sun 20 Nov 1994

Misc: Anomalies, Wh/animal in Russian, Ling and imperialism

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Directory

1. , Seeing the barn red
2. , Who animal in Russian etc.
3. Richard Ingham, Re: 5.1304 Sum: Linguistics and Imperialism

All right, since we're putting in anomalies:
How about the difference between
 "Jane imagined her spoon bent"
and
 "Uri Geller imagined his spoon bent"
?

 Mark A. Mandel
 Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200
 320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA : markdragonsys.com

Jules's point about animacy in the grammar of Russian does not
explain why Russians use *kto* 'who' for asking about varieties
of animals (as in *Kto tebja ukusil*, lit. 'WHO bit you', where
English and many other lgs would have 'What'). The problem is
that Polish has the same grammar of animacy in other respects
but would not use 'who' for animals that way (as far as I can
tell).

Alexis MR

Message 3: Re: 5.1304 Sum: Linguistics and Imperialism

On Wed, 16 Nov 1994, The Linguist List wrote:

) >
Grammar books in English came into being in the
) >18th century,

) > Peter Tan
)

That may be true of America, but in England there were already a fair
number in the 16th century, and more in the 17th century.

Just a couple of historical examples that surely make it hard to see any
necessary relation between linguistics and imperialism:

Von Humboldt, at a time when Germany didn't even exist as a nation
Baudoin de Courtenay, at a time when Poland ditto

In fact, I would have thought that proponents of critical language
awareness would see linguistics as potentially an instrument of liberation.

It's a truism that science can be used for good or bad; we seem to have
found another case in point.

Richard Ingham