LINGUIST List 5.717

Tue 21 Jun 1994

Disc: The popularisation of linguistics

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1. benji wald, Re: 5.700 Qs: Persian, Popularization of ling, Rhetorical ques,
2. benji wald, Re: 5.700 Qs: Persian, Popularization of ling, Rhetorical ques,

Message 1: Re: 5.700 Qs: Persian, Popularization of ling, Rhetorical ques,

I have followed the discussion of "popularisation of linguistics" with
fascination. Although nobody elected me, I feel a certain
responsibility to make some comments on the major issues which have
emerged in the discussion so far, since my perhaps intemperate
(or at least unmitigated) remarks seem to have precipitated
the discussion -- which quickly ascended to a higher level. Before
proceeding to comments I want to make a request. This is because
my comments are lengthy, but my request is simple. So if most readers
are like me their eyes will glaze over long before that get to
the bottom of my comments. Therefore, better to make the request first.
The request is, for those linguists who would like to communicate
their enthusiasm to a "lay" public (and also those who feel frustrated
by "how many languages do you speak?"):

WHAT DO YOU SAY IN CASUAL ENCOUNTERS to friends (or who/m/ever)
ABOUT WHAT LINGUISTICS IS?

I have my line worked out pretty well, and it comes in handy
because even professionally I'm a field linguist and a "street"
linguist, so I often use it to explain why I want to clip a
microphone to a speaker I'm interested in -- and I've done this
in various languages and cultures. It's no big deal, but it
usually gets an interested look and sometimes some comments
about "that's interesting", and in multilingual cultures genuine
understanding. However, I would like to hear what the responses
of other linguists are before I contaminate them with my explanation
(which is necessarily shortand to the point -- and maybe cuts through
some of the confusion that I detect in the list about what linguistics
is and has to offer humanity.

For logistical reasons, I hope that respondents can send their answers
directly to the list, where I'm sure they will appreciated and helpful
to many readers. However, I would like a copy forwarded directly to
me at:
 ibenawjmvs.oac.ucla.edu

The reason is simply that I will be away for a month, and I will
have to shut off the ling.list until I get back, otherwise my
account will explode. I may not be able to recover responses
made only directly to the list, but I obviously don't want to
miss them just because I'll be away. I figure if I wait till I get
back to make this request the discussion may have already
closed. In fact, it's not a feature of today's list. That's it
for the request.

I basically have extended comments about two issues which seemed salient to
me in the the discussion of popularization of linguistics so far.

Issue 1. anti-prescriptivism as linguistics' "gift" to humanity
Issue 2. What good is linguistics?

WARNING: This might be hard to take in one sitting. Maybe better to
save/delete and handle the request (first).

 In fact, I just decided to sen my comments separately as another message,
because they're long and I'm having trouble with spacing as a transfer
the file to be sent. Be right back. Benji

Message 2: Re: 5.700 Qs: Persian, Popularization of ling, Rhetorical ques,

This is the sequel to my last message, in which I asked how linguists
explain what linguistics is in casual encounters. I said I had some
comments to make about to issues which appeared salient to me in the
discussion "popularization of linguistics". They were 1. anti-
prescriptivism and 2. what good is linguistics?

 1. THE ANTI-PRESCRIPTIVE MISSION (NOT THE BEST THE FIELD HAS TO OFFER)
Loomi g large in discussion is this business about PRESCRIPTIVE
VS DESCRIPTIVE linguistics (as the dichotomy was formulated in
Bloomfield'stime). My own feeling is that it's not a good idea
to preach this to the public, and, even that linguists
who study language abstracted from its social context (let's call this
common practice "asocial linguistics) are not in a good position to be
making that assertion, because it is not clear that they have sufficient
understanding of the social implications of what's involved. After all,
"good", "bad", "equal" etc are terms with social implications
when applied to language. In fact, the ideologies behind
prescriptivism and anti-prescriptivism, I will suggest, are not as
straightforward as they may appear. As to general comments already made
questioning the wisdom of this issue as something for linguists to
champion before the public, I agree with them to some extent, but not
without further argument.

I suggest that in dealing with the public and understanding of why linguists
and the public have different views of language is helpful, while over-
simplistic views of what insights linguistics has to offer the public, or
about the intellectual state of the public are not.
To begin with, like other scientists, linguists do not necessarily, and
I think most often concern themselves with how linguistics fits into or
serves the societies whih nurture, support or tolerate it. As
scientists working on specific problems such unawareness is
understandable and may even be conducive to to solving specific
problems.

I guess what often happens is that a historically motivating problem which
may have begun as common ground between linguists (like other scientists)
and their society gets rejected, or at least temporarily put aside, by
linguists for some more immediately productive or attractive problem discovered
 along the way. Meanwhile the public still has the original problem
in its consciousness, and it becomes hard for linguists to connect
their current concerns with the historically motivating problem
which no longer concerns them, and which they may not even be aware of
(depending on their educational training). For the sake of example, we
might take the original motivating problem in linguistics to be
how to talk to God (although both the public and linguistics
 has moved a slight distance from this motivation: it lingers in the impatience
 to solve the mystery of human "nature") I'm oversimplifying, of course,
concern with oratory and rhetoric for political purposes also led to
interest in linguistic analysis among some classical societies, but I
wanted to choose one of the most striking examples, so I lifted the talk
to God motivation from, for example, Panini and Chomsky at age 4
in his attic (if I remember correctly, and I'm NOT making fun of Chomsky
here; I either read or somewhere heard this anecdote about him, maybe even
from Chomsky, and found it endearing, and also interesting in juxtaposition
with Panini).

>From a shallower time perspective the shift from 19th c emphasis on historical
linguistics to 20th c synchronic linguistics is another example. As I
understand it, Saussure was a mjaor player in bringing this about with
questions about:so language changes? You wanna know why? Then find out
what language is. Now "what is it?" has pretty much overshadowed the
motivating question of "why/how does it change?" to the extent that
synchronic linguists go into the history of a language for
inspiration in solving a synchronic analytical problem. I don't
think it would be difficult to find the connection between this
change in emphasis and changes in the interests of the societies
which support linguistics.I won't dwell on that here, other than
to claim that we are rarely concerned with those larger
interests when we do our linguistic work,assuming (boldly) that we are
even aware of the larger interests we serve (that'll get into
issue 2. "What good is linguistics?"), but there will be some
clues in my comments on the present issue 1. Incidentally, I
don't think linguists had much to do with causing the changing
interests of their societies, but displayed much ingenuity in
adopting their discipline to those changes. This in itself is no
small accomplishment -- but who would deny that historical
linguistics has shrunk in institutionalised prominence?

With regard to the issue about the relation of linguistics to its societies,
in relation to anti-prescriptivist zealoutry, Maxwell (9 June) observed that
the zealots are not able to practice what they preach, i.e., they can't
get published in the nonstandard languages which they maintain are "equal"
with the almighty standard. To this, I can also note with my keen powers of
observation that I have also noticed that at conferences linguists also
wear clothes, some even suits and ties, even when it's hot. The criticism
goes at least as far back as Hall's "Leave your language alone" -- written
in standard English (well, how else will they take me seriously?) --
and later,sociolinguists felt the sting of ingratitude of the mass
media, when in their enthusiasm the sociolinguists in question misjudged just
how far challenges to the "establishment" would be allowed to
go, in the liberating (but deceptive) atmosphere of the late
1960s thru mid 1970s. The media still occasionally kicks (at)
us, when they temporarily run out of little linguistic
cutenesses to tickle their readers with. A little spleen to remind the reader
that language is not all fun, it's also serious business, requiring a serious
and responsible attitude. (but let's not think we're all that important to
them, the media gets the most mileage in spleen by trying to
enforce their norms on their own confused ranks -- with results
which do not threaten the uniformitarian hypothesis of language
change.)

In this context, Gupta's comment (June 7) was interesting, about
how linguists preaching the doctrine of anti-prescriptivism
could be mistaken (?)for "revolutionaries". My take on the
history of our discipline in the early 19th c recognises the
thread of "revolution". Even if the original insight attributed
to Sir William Jones came from imperialistic rather than
revolutionary circumstances, it is wellknown that the founders and many
practitioners of historical linguistics, with their serious
interest in dialectology as well, were motivated by
nationalistic impulses --to discover and legitimise the
roots of their "nations", dominated by transnational royal dynasties (it's no
accident that Germany and Austria-Hungary were where the action
was, as scholars struggled to legitimise their national cultures
against a "pan-Europeanism" associated with transnational
intermarrying monarchies oriented toward Western Europe as the pinnacle
of "culture" -- nationalistic impulses giving later rise to
20th century racist perversions of concepts like "Aryan",
probably taking advantage of educated popular confusion between Indo-ARYAN
and Indo-GERMANIC -- thus one of the most widely known Sanskrit loanwords
in modern languages is "swastika" -- and we still marvel about
blonde mummies found in China and are quicker to wonder if they
spoke an Indo-European lg than Altaic, Uralic, Sino-Tibetan, or whatever
else).
 I do not mean to suggest that 19th century historical linguistic giants
were proto-nazis, I'm sure some resented the way their research was perverted,
and their struggle to give German a fabulous history, when French was the
prestige language in Europe, is understandable (but, of course, connecting
German with French wouldn't have been sufficient for nationalistic pride).
What I am suggesting is that they were feeding into important interests
of their societies in their times, interests which have changed so that
neither genetic origin, history or historical linguistics is so
highly valued as it was then. And the decline of all these are interrelated.
Incidentally, it is only recently that the faulty historical assumption of
migration (n.b. of gene carriers) in linguistic trees has been seriously
challenged (e.g., Renfrew 1987 against Gimbutas etc.), where the alternative
is spread of pieces of culture (e.g., language) without mass migration,
conquest and all that romantic stuff. At the same time, it is understandable
why the tree model prevailed over the wave model in the 19th century when
racist preoccupation with genes was important, the wave theory implies that
languages and (by the same assumptions as used for the tree models) their
users are all mongrels.

Levin's comments on the standardisation of Lithuanian (7 June) were a relevant
response to Cowan's attempts to criticise the anti-prescriptivist ideology in
linguistics. I have just noted that the ideology in the
prescriptive/descriptive dichotomy is older than Bloomfield by
far, the point at which Cowan stopped. Historical linguists
found their "roots" in peasant speech -- hey,this peasant
is still using an Indo-European word that has disappeared from the"standard".
This humble peasant has preserved our patrimony. Down with the Emperor and his
foreign wife! Thus begins the respect for dialects in linguistics (and for a
while, for some linguists at least, dialect was not a laughing
matter -- many linguists, although they know "better", still
have their ingrained amusement at dialects-- ask me about
reactions to my New York City accent -- I have to go to Europe
beforeI just sound "American", and there many linguists don't even notice
I'm "r-less" until I point it out -- amazing! we thought only the
British were " r-less"! Well, they're syntacticians, they don't
listen to language, they LOOK at it.)

Cowan had ignored how standardisation is indeed studied -- maybe he took a
narrow view of what counts as linguistics (to issue 2 below). Not to
dwell on the sociolinguistic literature on this topic, students of
English, at least, still learn how Caxton "axed" what kind of English
he should publish in, in conjunction with his "eggs/eyren" anecdote
 --and we understand that the ensuing cultivation of a literary standard was in
 the interests of publishers as well as journalists and all
those other people who make money from communicating with a
diverse and largely anonymous market of readers who wouldbe left
out of various subtle turns of phrases (to say the least) if
the language merchants had only the resources of a local
language/dialect to communicate with. Of course, they wouldn't
buy the literature to begin with -- which is why I can't buy Swahili
novels at Crown Books (or Barnes and Noble's)

In sum, then, Levin reminds us that there is a point to standardisation, while
Newman (11 June) reminds us that it doesn't follow that "dialects" have to be
disrespected. So why do teachers dis multiple negation, etc? I have always
assumed it's due to the same overwork that makes parents tell
toddlers not to stick their fingers in light sockets, without
giving an explanation beyond "bad! bad! naughty! naughty!"
Students being a little older and presumably wiser get the
benefit of a little myth like "two negatives make a positive",
Don't tell that to the Russians who would probably answer the
question about English in Russian with NIkto NE zna-et (NEG-who
NEG knows ="nobody /don't/ know-s") The food for thought is that
we continue to believe what we were told as children unless we
get exposed to contradictory views. But, as I said, telling
people that it's OK to use double negatives because Beowulf did
is not a smart tactic for linguists to use, and it's not
even unconditionally true in a socially contextualised world. The
linguist who gives such advice better be prepared for the question:
do you tell your own schoolage children that or just other people's
children?

Levin overlooked something in his claim that God understands all dialects of
Lithuanian. That is, as Panini realised (or insisted for his
project without dissenting review), God does not understand the
Prakrits, hence our ancient intellectual ancestor connected
language with religion, and thus with morality, and finally with that
greatest of all tyrants, the doctrine of "correctness" (not in the
generativist sense of "correctness" of course -- but I don't like that
word in any sense -- I feel like I'm in court, what's wrong with
"right"?) Thus, I'm curious to know what some American
fundametalists make of the King James Bible use of 'DIGGED" for the past
tense of (you got it) "DIG". Divine oversight? Immorality???? But
 I think the right approach is to ASK them, not to TELL them.
Anyway, some fundamentalists might ask: what's wrong with that? (I didn't tell
 it right, but if you chuckled I gotcha because I was appealing
to that elitist "snobbishness" about "correct" usage -- think
about it, but now you know that I'm not above such base
rhetorical devices either, when it suits my purposes -- hey! what's
wrong with a little humor once in a while? "How many anti-prescriptivists
does it take to change a light bulb?" "That's not funny!!"

In discussing the merits of standard English (not my purpose here) Rosenwald
(10 June) invokes Labov, unarguably the greatest dialectologist yet (and
one who gets annoyed when some linguists giggle at the accents
when he plays his tapes at linguistic conferences -- in his
presence linguists have been learning to check those
unprofessional but previously involuntary impulses). In context,
Labov was arguing against the "revolutionary" notion of pushing
on BEV-speaking kids in the public schools an artificially
concocted would-be-institutionalised BEV that nobody actually
speaks. We already have a standard (of sorts). Even more
pointedly, he had to deal with the truly "extremist" position
that Standard English should be rejected as a school subject in
the inner city. His point was that it would be a disservice to
withold standard English from the kids (because legitimizing BEV
as an acceptable language for public discourse is not likely to
succeed outside ofthe BEV community -- and was/is, in fact,
problematic WITHIN the Black community.) The "extremist" view,
similar in inspiration to 19th c Central European romantic nationalism,
has drastically declined. It is at first liberating to learn
that your stigmatised language has legitimacy, and that that
legitimacy is even acknowledged by some outside experts with academic
credentials. But, then, it becomes clear that there is a limit
to how far that legitimacy can be pushed before encountering
tremendous social resistance with obvious practical consequences
-- a separate nation for BEV speakers? Not too many takers for that
idea.

This episode should not be confused with Labov's earlier defense
of BEV in "the logic of nonstandard English", where he showed
that logic transcends the language it is spoken in (I think
Salkie was making this point in his 13 June message,but mixed
with gripes about faulty logic, which I think was directed at
prescriptive arguments against pieces of nonstandard language).

It was the more-than-minimal success of such papers as Labov's with some
educators, many of whom, I suspect, already perceived the truth
of the point he was to make but did not have the background or
ability to express what Labov expressed, which may have
encouraged some linguists to go too far (for the times, much less
the present time) in challenging standard English because of its
use as a form of oppression, of "gate-keeping" to social
privilege, as Erickson and some other ethnographers put it.
What to do about it is still a problem. Preaching equality
of languages ain't gonna do it. It's easy to see that standard
English and BEV ain't equal. What's not so easy is to really
understand "why?"

Anyway, fly-swatting against the puny arguments of the prescriptivists
is easy, but no matter how many arguments you shoot down they'll come
up with more -- and society is stacked so the burden of proof is on you
to show that anti-prescriptivism is "true". Where Labov was good was
that he had the information to PROVE that BEV and its speakers are just as
capable of logic as standard English and its institutions (if not more).
As I said before, you better know A LOT about the social context of
language if you want to go out and be an anti-prescriptivist in public.
Labov's efforts were martialled toward a specific point, defending a
 particular language, he didn't prove anything about anything else. How
 much work do you think you'll have to do prove ALL languages are "equal".
 Is that what linguistics is about? (yes/no/maybe/it depends what you mean)

To sum up this anti-prescriptive issue, as I see it, my suggestion is that
linguists would be well advised to understand the social
implications of what they believe (or if they really believe it
as members of society) rather than go blindly charging into the
public arena with a dogma of anti-prescriptivism which does not
take into account the societal underpinnings of the opposed dogma
of prescriptivism --and often where the anti-prescriptivist
issue comes from, and what the true dimensions of its implications are.

As some discussants have noted, we, as linguists, can take a "God-like" view of
the equality of all varieties of language in an ASOCIAL context (i.e., in God's
"society"),pausing to consider how basic pidgins fit into this view (oh, all
FIRST languages, oh but then what about universals and innate
features of language -- don't pidgins have them too? And what
about my "bad" French? On what authority can ANY French speaker criticise
French? So on what basis are all languages equal? Relativist
dogma?), but unless we understand how language fits into SOCIETY
we cannot begin to communicate with a public which does not have
practice in separating its ASOCIAL beliefs about language/s
from the SOCIAL forces which shape these beliefs. In fact, just
HOW such beliefs about language are intertwined with the fabric
of society is amatter for further study, not something that
anybody alive knows to satisfaction. This lack of total knowledge
should not, indeed must not, deter linguists from speaking out
against language-based injustice. Injustice comes in cases. If you
got the facts for a particular case go out and defend it. But strangely
enough, the "significant" generalisation "all languages are equal" is
pretty near useless. Maybe its use is it can lead you to SUSPECT
a language injustice is being done, and go get an expert to figure it.

[ANS. to one of the questions above when SOCIAL embedding of language is
 taken into account. French speakers can criticise my French because
 I call it FRENCH. Anybody want to try ASOCIAL criticism of my French,
 or better yet,an asocial DEFENSE of my French?]

 So much for anti-prescriptivism. There's gotta be better stuff in
 linguistics for the public than that. So next message is "what good
 is linguistics?"