From jmpfund@bgnet.bgsu.edu Sun Feb 11 07:09:27 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 HAA48364 for ; Sun, 11 Feb 2001 07:09:26 -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 HAA31583 for ; Sun, 11 Feb 2001 07:09:26 -0800 Received: from [129.1.190.163] ([129.1.190.163]) by sp07.notesnet.bgsu.edu (Lotus Domino Release 5.0.2b) with ESMTP id 2001021110073989:95 ; Sun, 11 Feb 2001 10:07:39 -0500 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: jmpfund@popj.bgsu.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <3A86C4BE.29681.1975112E@localhost> References: <3A86C4BE.29681.1975112E@localhost> Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2001 10:09:11 -0400 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: James Pfundstein Subject: Re: me (sic!) on linguistics X-MIMETrack: Itemize by SMTP Server on MAIL03/SERVER/BGSU(Release 5.0.2b |December 16, 1999) at 02/11/2001 10:07:40 AM, Serialize by Router on MAIL03/SERVER/BGSU(Release 5.0.2b |December 16, 1999) at 02/11/2001 10:07:45 AM, Serialize complete at 02/11/2001 10:07:45 AM Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" At 4:58 PM +0900 2/11/01, Steven J. Willett wrote: >It's unfair I suppose to poke at the >linguists for practising the same unreadable academic prose as their >humanist fellows, especially when they have the cachet of science >on their side, but one might plausibly expect that academics who >immerse themselves in the very heart and nature of language would >display some skill in handling it. It is unfair, I think-- academics as a rule are not great stylists --but I think there is something that tends to be awkward about the writing of linguists. When I was an undergraduate major I decided (rightly or wrongly, as I watched some of my profs twisting in their own verbal winds) that it came from excessive consciousness of linguistic ambiguity, and an attempt to disambiguate everything they said. >Not all languages that remain stable for long periods, such as >Icelandic the past eight centuries, are embalmed, and not all >attempts to stabilize vocabulary and usage, such as that of the >French (or at least the AF), are inherently ludicrous, though perhaps >hopeless in the end. The suggestion that languages "evolve" in >obedience to some scientific law is a misleading metaphor. Acorns >evolve into oaks; languages just change in all sorts of ways under a >variety of cultural and environmental forces. No natural laws are >involved as Steven Pinker likes to argue, though in retrospect we >can sometimes abstract phonological principles like the Great Vowel >Shift from the data. Oaks don't evolve from acorns; they grow from them. I think one could argue that languages do evolve, i.e. they adapt to fit a sociological niche (or die off) the way that species adapt to fit an ecological niche (or die off). But it's a metaphorical similarity at best, I suspect most linguists would reject out of hand the idea that languages evolve. JM("Mot Juste")P .