From jmpfund@bgnet.bgsu.edu Sun Feb 11 07:57:31 2001 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW00.12) with ESMTP id HAA48358 for ; Sun, 11 Feb 2001 07:57:30 -0800 Received: from sp07.notesnet.bgsu.edu (sp07.notesnet.bgsu.edu [129.1.7.7]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id HAA01506 for ; Sun, 11 Feb 2001 07:57:29 -0800 Received: from [129.1.190.163] ([129.1.190.123]) by sp07.notesnet.bgsu.edu (Lotus Domino Release 5.0.2b) with ESMTP id 2001021110554522:96 ; Sun, 11 Feb 2001 10:55:45 -0500 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: jmpfund@popj.bgsu.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: References: Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2001 10:57:45 -0400 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: James Pfundstein Subject: I.A. Richards, Jacques Barzun, & ECK (to say nothing of the dog) X-MIMETrack: Itemize by SMTP Server on MAIL03/SERVER/BGSU(Release 5.0.2b |December 16, 1999) at 02/11/2001 10:55:45 AM, Serialize by Router on MAIL03/SERVER/BGSU(Release 5.0.2b |December 16, 1999) at 02/11/2001 10:55:49 AM, Serialize complete at 02/11/2001 10:55:49 AM Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" At 2:25 PM -0700 2/10/01, KOPFF E CHRISTIAN wrote: >It ends with a reference to Allen Walker Read's dictum: >"No native speaker can make a mistake." I would take more seriously ECK's strictures on linguistics if there were any sign he had read any of the great linguists of the 20th century, apart from Allen Walker Read. Whoever that may be: I was happily ignorant of Read and his inane misstatement, until ECK brought him up, then brought him up again, and now again; a quick search of the bibliographies and indexes of half a dozen linguistics books on my shelf show no trace of this great scholar. If ECK is going to go on using Read as his touchstone for linguistics, perhaps he will be so good as to demonstrate why he thinks Read is so central to the intellectual enterprise of modern linguistics, and why he thinks that this one poorly phrased remark damns the work of Bloomfield, Chomsky & Halle, Labov, and others. I find myself unshaken by the knowledge that several eminent noses, besides ECK's own, have pointed with disdain and alarm at linguistics. His anthology of opinions regarding linguistics may contain one name or ten thousand without having any significant impact: issues of fact are not settled by counting noses (however wise and knowing those noses might be). Opinions are not evidence and incantation is not argument. JMP("Philologus") .