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This is the last part of my comments on the discussion of "popularization
of linguistics" It deals with the discussion theme:
2. WHAT GOOD IS LINGUISTICS? (gulp!)
So if anti-prescriptivism isn't our treasure for humanity, what
is? A MOST STARTLING ISSUE in the list discussion so far. And
I can admit it's the one I had in mind when I wrote earlier:
"... (or is it an insecurity?) ..."
(i.e., not a "real snobbism", whatever that might be -- like
"the ignorant public does not realise that all languages are
equal" (?) How could they? How many languages do THEY
speak/know about?) The startling issue is:
"what good is linguistics?"
germane to such topics as: should it be instituted as a required
part of public education?
For linguists to ask this question is quite interesting. Revealing was the
variety of opinions about what linguistics is. Some assumed it
meant lots of formalism (as if an older formalism of sentence
parsing and the like wasn't already part of the curriculum -- to
the pleasure of some budding linguists andthe pain of the
majority who don't know about "form-class substitution" and what
the point of the exercises is, not that their teachers always
know, for that matter -- something about recognising dangling
participles?). This reminded me of a minority response I have
sometimes got to "linguistics!" "linguistics?" Instead of "how
many languages do you speak?" it's "OOOH, I HEARD THAT'S HARD."
ANYBODY ELSE OUT THERE?
(Right, it mainly comes from college students who have heard about it from
other college students who took some? introductory course, or
heard about itfrom someone else who did, etc. More rarely by
someone so impressed by the clarity of Chomsky's political
writings that they dared to look untutored at his linguistic
writings and were stunned by its "technicality". By the way,
there's even a rarer response that goes "LINGUIST. WOW! THAT'S
GREAT!" I wish I could characterise the ones who make that
response. They're so disorienting I forget to ask why they said that.)
I agree with people like Hudson, Teeter and a few others who REALISED that some
thing in linguistics should be part of compulsory education. It's the question
of WHAT that seemed confused to me. At least for our insular anglocentric
societies I think a course that gives some depth on English,
historical, and some breadth on its relation to other languages
is in order. That would help take the ethnocentric (= ignorant)
edge off popular views of language (to some extent) and
demystify other languages, at least as manifest in the naive
monolingual view that somebody who speaks two or more languages
has to be some kind of mental genius. (But of course, it depends
WHICH languages, English has to be one of them in the US, and
they better speak English right! Could be British English, or its
indistinguishables, in fact, British English is even better than American
-- makes you sound real authoritative (good for selling expensive cars too)
and the other one could be French but not Spanish, but it's
gotta be the right French, not Cajun etc., depending on
awareness by locale in the US). Of course, if you just speak English
but speak it right you might also be mistakenfor a genius, if
not a nerd (I think nerds have to wear glasses, though, last time I
spot-checked American culture).
Anyway, what I have in mind is something simple, like the trade-off between
word order and case systems etc. Typological stuff is generally fun and
comprehensible, but leave out the stuff about implications -- they don't
work anyway. Could even bring some Latin back, but in a good way
(I enjoyed Latin in High School, due to my perverse interest in
languages, I don't think it's bad that it's gone from most high
schools, givenits traditional uses. Latin is no longer
necessary as a gate-keeper, standard English does that quite
well, as some of the teachers out there have noticed. Latin may
have helped me crash the gate. Chemistry sure didn't. I wasn't made
aware of my accent until I got to college (and I declined to waste my
time having my short a's lowered, they'd probably want a checkup on my
long open o's now, make sure they're open enough, and maybe a lube on
my postvocalic l's They weren't concerned about r-less-ness yet, Ivy
League and all that) but it couldn't have helped in high school. But,
my writing wasn't bad at that time, that was before I discovered the
parenthetical comment device. It really kills my rhythm, but I don't
know how to make footnotes for the ling.list.
Also some non-Indo-European languages should be discussed in the compulsory
course. In America definitely a sampling of African languages, and I
I favor some typological variety there. Swahili, of course, for its
morphological complexity. Maybe Yoruba for tones and serial verbs. Anything
to deflate the still common myth that African languages must be similar to
the popular concept of pidgin English but with different words).
Next, Chinese should be demystified, and how different it is
from Japanese. Look they put the verb at the end and stillwere
able to invent the Walkman. Fun for Chinese would be ABX tests with tonal
minimal pairs, among other things. Obviously which languages might be
chosen for special mention and/or for hands-on experience should vary by
locale, and it could put a lot of linguists towork, including
linguists who don't speak the languages natively but can work
with people who do (including the students) and apply their field
methods tools of analysis to isolate some interesting points of
comparison. (A Kenneth Pike in every school! OK, you can look at
grammars of the languages,too. This isn't "Field Methods")
In multilingual classrooms this could actually allow some
students to become stars for a day, instead of objects of ridicule.
"Gee, I didn't know you could do that!" LA's a paradise for this.
In Hollywood we can do Spanish, Tagalog, Korean, Armenian, Russian hands-on
all in the same set of classrooms.
I'm talking linguistics and languages, not linguistics and formal systems -- at
least until comparison of languages leads up to why formal systems are useful
to "capture generalisations" across languages (but let's find a
better way to say that for unindoctrinated human beings) ....
ISN'T LINGUISTICS ABOUT LANGUAGES? AREN'T WE LUCKY THERE ARE DIFFERENT
LANGUAGES SO THAT WE DON'T LIVE UNDER THE ILLUSION THAT ALL LANGUAGES
ARE LIKE ENGLISH (OR THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG WITH THEM)? WHAT'S THE
PROBLEM? SHOULDN'T EVERYBODY KNOW THIS STUFF? WHY NOT?
Don't tell them how great linguistics and LANGUAGES are. SHOW them.
Believe me, everybody loves dialect stuff. Don't I milk mine too? And
then the dialect stuff should be explained historically. Includes reading
guys who couldn't get out of sixth grade now, but for some
strange reason are still published. Look, Caxton, the most
literate man of his time (in England) and inspirer of "correct
English" -- a "practical" invention, not God's language --Caxton
said/wrote "axe" for "ask", etc. etc. Guess why we don't write
like that anymore? Hand in imaginative essays on Friday. Monday
we discuss thevarious ideas and Tuesday we compare them with
some other views. You think that's gonna bore kids? I think
you're wrong. (the cynics anticipate pupils arguing: well,Caxton would have
WROTE it that way, so why can't I? Not to mention his lousy spelling.
Why you can't is next week, so don't be sick. I guess Maxwell is suggesting
that some linguists need to take this course too, or is it
Maxwell who needs this course? Actually the cynics are saying, if
you hand in the essays on Friday and we have to discuss them in
class on Monday you'll ruin my weekend.)
Here I have dwelled particularly on Anglocentric societies, but I think
whatever the society, "monolingual" or multilingual, linguistics
has enough to offer to make an elementary course (and more) -- and an
interesting one (it HAS TO be, otherwise forget it). What
in particular it has to offer will obviously depend on the society -- it won't
be all the same things in all societies.
The important point is that this should be done as LINGUISTICS,
NOT as a feed from linguistics to some other discipline, where
it inevitably gets distorted according to the interests of that
field. Those linguists who have had the contact to learn what
happens to linguistic concepts in other disciplines know what
I'm talking about.
Just one more note on American society. In discussing the
Latinate vocabulary in English, it would be of interest to point
out that many words which sound fancy and impressive in English are
related to ordinary everyday words in Spanish (a low-prestige
language, unfortunately, in the US). My favorite is Spanish
"equivocar" ("to make a mistake"), an elementary word, while
"equivocate" (admittedly with a somewhat different meaning) is
not encountered by most English speakers until graduate school,
if then. I mention this because some upwardly mobile Mexican
American high school students I once spoke with were ashamed of
the "slang" Spanish they spoke with their elders, but wanted to
take French rather than (standard) Spanish for their language
requirement (they recognised the prestige). (But in French you
don't "equivocate", you "deceive yourself", not
impressive-sounding in English,despite its semantic insight and
peculiar morality). In the old days Latin was often justified
on the basis that the roots would give English speakers greater
access to learned words. Spanish could serve just as well with
the additional benefit ofintroducing the notions of sound
correspondences and sound change (not that it's not simpler to
just teach Latin and Greek roots as pieces of English word
formation). Anyway,sound correspondences and linguistic change
is also of interest to English dialectology -- like why "cot"
and "caught" are spelled differently, quite opaque to the
current youth in LA, but obvious to New Yorkers. At the same
time, it's lower class to distinguish "witch" and "which" in LA.
The lower classes lose again in the ever-changing concerns over
the minutiae of the standard! (What! the lower classes make
the distinction naturally, then we gotta stop trying to teach it to
our "better" students! Where do they still teach this big deal
of early twentieth century prescriptivism? See, the standard is
not always conservative (in the linguistic sense). And,by the
way, what ever happened to the righteous indignation over
"hopefully" as a clause adverbial? A favorite media target in the early
1980s) Meanwhile, many high schools in New York are doing whatever they
can to make the distinction between "cot" and "caught" opaque to their
students (in favor of the vowel of "cot", of course)
I'm almost tired, but a comment on Fowler (12 June) seems necessary. Fowler's
comment on the need to separate essentials from jargon was valuable, and
the example was instructive. However, I don't think that I don't think it
was as clear as he seemed to think. First, linguists who talk
like his quote demonstrate the problem of HOW TO TALK TO THE PUBLIC. Maybe
linguists who can't help talking that way about language should
be isolated from the public and stick to the valuable theoretical work they
do, rather than being exposed to the public where they run the risk of
"depopularising" linguistics and increasing the discouraging
"WOW! THAT'S HARD" reaction. Do they think the public is
impressed if they use big incomprehensible words to describe
some current (or I will suggest even out-moded) linguistic
bugaboo, as if that's really gonna legitimise it? I think not.
Americans, at least, are not that trustful of "authority" --
even in language. For example, they don't believe me when I tell them
"between you and I" is "wrong" (yeah, some things even bug me when I'm off
guard -- only kidding, I use it to tease when I think I can get
away with it,I'll never admit I really hate it).
Why do teenagers use "like"? As far as I can tell, the question was coming
from the stereotyped 1960s-70s use which is not so common anymore, as in
he's LIKE always complaining
Your stereotyped hippie used it. Check out period movies, since you may have to
wait a long time before you can jump on your modern teenager for using it.
The linguists' answer about QUOTATIVES was coming from a related
but newer (1980s-present) and ubiquitous (age-graded but common up to at
least mid 30s) as in
"so I'm LIKE, what's he complaining about?"
What both uses have in common is the use of "like" as a
mitigator, through its use for comparison, marking the correspondence as
hypothetical, not precise.
(Which use is it in "Mercury is LIKE a liquid metal"?)
In the old use its most common function is "I'm not stating my proposition
precisely -- BUT I DON'T HAVE TO BECAUSE YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN
(IF YOU'RE ONE OF US)" The quotative use is similar ("don't hold
me literally to what I'm saying"),but with narrower scope
disclaims that the quote is exact - or even that there was
anyspeech to report at all -- it is often used to represent what the
reported actor gestured or THOUGHT (thus, quite often the reporter actor
is "I" the speaker) BUT MIGHT HAVE SAID IF I//S/HE HAD SAID ANYTHING.
So, to the extent that I understand the example of the question
and the response there was still miscommunication -- to the
extent that there was communication at all. Were the linguists
younger than the radio commentator who asked the question (or
just less prone to drag older stereotypes out of the files)? I hope they
at least "corrected" the commentator that it's (sic!) not only teenagers
who use it.
OK. I just blew this whole night with this thing! Last word on what good
is linguistics? You figure it out. Here are the clues.
Languages are good (we as a species and in any other way you want to
look at it NEED it)
Linguistics is about languages (right? right? Oh it's about "language"
that's different?)
What else do you need? Linguistics MUST BE good, but then you knew
that all along, didn't you? So I'm through.
REMINDER: so WHAT'S YOUR CASUAL (AND/OR SHORT) ANSWER TO "WHAT'S LINGUISTICS?"
Benji
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