linguistics_ an overview

8/13/2019 Linguistics_ an Overview

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A Broad Overview

A colleague recently asked me to come to a class in his course

on Language, and talk with a small group of students about

Linguistics....... he said briefly. I replied that I would be glad to

come, but as I thought it over later, that word "briefly" kept

sticking in my mind. I sat down with pencil and paper this

morning and tried to put together some account of the manypaths which one could take to reach the central body of the

discipline we call "Linguistics".

It often happens that when you ask a simple question, you find

yourself getting a complex answer, and that is very much in the

nature of things. I could point to a shelf of books on various

aspects of language, and even a handful of books which survey

the "field" in detail. But there is a practical use to the simple

answer, even if it is much condensed, and that is the purpose of

this intentionally "brief" paper.

If there is any one characteristic which distinguishes humankind

most critically, it is the use of language. As habitual users of

Language in every aspect of our lives, we are all curious about

this tool which we use so conveniently and so automatically.

There are tricks of expressions which every language surprises

us with, there are games and puns and crossword puzzles galore,

and we all have a genuine curiosity about where our Language

came from and where it stands in a world which has some six

thousand actual "Families", containing tens of thousands of

individual languages.

This is an embarrassment of riches, more than a team of

researchers can expect to survey in depth and report back to our

conference table, with any hope of enlightening perceptions. At

the other end of the situation, we have a right to be curious

about our own native tongue, and this is the normal starting

point for someone who wants to know a little more. But there is

no thread which will take you back from your native English to

the remote point from which language started to evolve. And

there is little understanding of when or how or even why

language evolved in the first place.

istics: An Overview http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/lingui

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So let me try to outline in the simplest terms what Linguistics as

"general language study" has been about in the past, not as a

survey of all the work which has accrued, but as a set of

signposts which point us to areas of serious activity and concern

about Language

It was in ancient India, long before Western scholars became

aware of Sanskrit as a possible parent or early relative of the

older level of European tongue, that Linguistics first appeared as

an exact, descriptive science. Panini, the master grammarian of

the Sanskrit language, was probably working in the second

century B.C., although the exact dates are unsure. Linguistic

material was considered of great important since it bore directly

on the reading and interpretation of the ancient Vedic and

Mantric texts. For a comprehensive understanding of the details

of the Sanskrit language, Panini's descriptive grammar probably

has no equal in any culture at any period.

Panini's grammar is formatted into hundreds of rules which

describe exactly specific features of the language. These are

grouped together by sounds and sound-groups, rather than parts

of speech in the Western manner. To this day students doing the

ancient language, the Indian equivalent of Latin in our schools,

learn vast memory-banks of rules first, and then as they progress

reading texts, the teacher demonstrates how the learned rules

explain the linguistic phenomena. This may seem the hard way

to study grammar, but the act of memorizing was considered a

valid part of the educational scheme, and like the Asian study of

"characters" probably had important side effects in developing a

capacious memory. In the last half of the 20th century

"memorizing" has fallen into disrepute in America, with the sad

result that modern students have very small supplies of fact and

exact data in their possession. If Panini stands at one pole in the

learning process, we seem to have aligned ourselves with the

opposite pole.

When the early Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet (alpha

= Hebr. aleph etc.) they provided themselves with a remarkably

efficient linguistic toolbox which permitted quick access to

writing as part of the ordinary citizen's skills. As in India, when a

body of important writing became canonized (in this case the

largely secular or semi-religious literature of Greece), it became

clear that books, libraries and scholars would become the base

for a discipline which they called "Philologia", the love of

learning. By the time of Aristotle the word was used in this

sense and was a cornerstone of the Alexandrian scholarship of

the 2 c. B.C. for the scholars who were the curators of the


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venerable Greek literature. They did perform some basic

linguistic services, both in elucidation of rare and dialectic

words, and in their assay of truth in the manuscript tradition.

School systems quickly devised the doctrine of the functions of

linguistic materials, which have survived virtually intact as our

"parts of speech". The use of "paradeigmata" or examples of

word-inflection was a part of every classroom study, and again

this persisted well into the 20th century, more an anachronism

than a necessary part of the teaching equipment.

Just as the Renaissance confirmed Greco-Roman tastes in

poetry, rhetoric and architecture, it established ancient

Grammar, especially that which the Roman school-grammarians

had developed by the 4th c. A.D., as an inviolate system of

logical expression. In the writing of Sanchez's book "Minerva,

sive de causis Linguae Latinae... 1587" the author (a.k.a

Sanctius!) posited Latin as the linguistic equivalent to Logic, an

un-logical view which persisted generally, and especially among

Classicists, into the 20th century. With the appearance of a new

approach to Linguistics in the early 20th c. this view wasgradually disbanded in the schools, but not without a fight.

When the writer and politician De Busbecq (died l592), noted in

his travels in the Black Sea area, that the natives of a certain

area spoke a rare dialect of a Germanic type which had words

apparently cognate with developed German, for example "fimf"

= NHG "fu'nf", he chanced upon a kind of data which would

later lead to the development of Historical Linguistics, which

must be based on collected data of this sort. Without masses of

observed linguistic information, theory of language is

impossible, which is why I mention this insignificant collectionof Crimea-Gothic words at this point. Had this traveler inquired

further he could have given us an invaluable selection of what

was probably eighth century Gothic, halfway between the

Gothic Bible of the 4 th c. A.D. and the developed Germanic

tongues. As it is we have a handful of isolated words.

But it was Sir William Jones (l746-92), a man of vast language-

learning talent and master of some thirteen languages including

Arabic, basic Chinese and Sanskrit, who first propounded the

notion of cognate families of languages. Having become

proficient in Sanskrit during the time of his judgeship of thesupreme court of judicature at Calcutta, he saw that the ancient

Indian language was clearly related to the Greek and Latin he

knew from his student days. His knowledge of German

confirmed his view, which became the basis for the

Indo-European theory, a hypothesis which stated that Sanskrit

was either parent or older cousin of all the older languages of

Europe. In his day Jones was known as a leading "Orientalist",

but his fame rests now largely upon his anticipation of the

detailed and scientific work of the l9 th century German


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linguists.

Toward the end of the 18th century many new views about the

most basic things were coming to be aired. If Priestley and

Cavendish showed that there were hidden secrets which analysis

made clear, documentable by detailed and careful observations

of the most precise kind, this message was not lost on the early

years of the oncoming century. Atomic theory with Dalton

became more of a pressing reality than Lucretius' 1 c B.C.Books I-II could ever be, Volta's early work with a chemical

electric cell opened the doors for complex analysis of mineral

compounds via electric dissolution. This opened new worlds of

orderly systems in the world of Chemistry, to be finally

consolidated by Mendeljeef's Period Tables half a century later.

And when Darwin and Russell at mid-century pointed to

biological evolution as continued process and virtual Law, the

world showed itself clearly interested in orderly and

documented statements of developmental behavior.

This series of lessons was not lost on those involved with thelanguages. The Grimm brothers developed a whole orderly

science of Germanic Linguistics, capping their research with

study of developmental traits in Folklore with the famous

Germanic folk stories. Bopp produced the first Sanskrit

dictionary in the West, and Indic studies were undertaken not

only as fascinating in their own right, but as part of a newly

assumed "Western Tradition". If Grimm and Bopp were the first

generation of these Indo-Europeanist Linguists, then Brugman

after l875 codified and consolidated this new study into a solid

academically viable "field", which by then was a German

proprietary item called "Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft".It is hard not to imagine the furor of activity and attention paid

to painstaking detail with which the German scholars attacked,

documented and codified this new field of language research,

and soon all of Europe as well as America were working on IE

linguistic research or teaching it in the colleges.This new field of

Indo-European linguistics is now listed as a major section of

Historical Linguistics, and it is a prime example of the

Comparative Method used in a singularly rich exploratory field.

The inner relationships of the major branches of this linguistic

tree are too complex to list briefly, but this link to

Indo-European Background will give a quick overview of thearea.

This time was also ripe for probing into the past. Every country

explored its folklore, its writings in the archaic period, and its

"tradition'. England was fascinated in the 18th century with

Elizabethan Reliques of Ancient Poetry edited by Bishop Percy,

which paved the way with works by. Blackwell, Wood and soon

F A Wolf in Germany on the originality of Homer's writings.

Soon the linguistic philologists had picked up a vein of interest


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in unraveling ancient documents into early, late and interpolated

passages, culminating in the relatively sophisticated linguistic

analysis methods of the Homeric Problem. This was after all not

really literary analysis, but first and last a study of words as

words, which may be one of the reasons that the Homeric

Problem today is neglected as a curious phase of an older level

of scholarship.

During this period, which we now see as the heyday of IEHistorical Linguistics, much information was sketched out for a

vast Indo European migration from somewhere between Black

and Caspian Seas, if not North India. Whether it was IE or Idg.

in name, the doctrine was scientific in attitude, academic in

spirit, imaginative and semi-historical in scope, and immensely

popular. By early 20th c. it was clear that so much of the basic

work had already been finalized, that Indo-Europeanists seemed

to despair of going much further in their research. There was

always detail to be filled in, but the outlines of the basic field

were firmly delineated already. During the second half of the

20th century archaeologists working closely with anthroplogistshave done a great deal of work on ancient sites in Eastern

Europe especially, many dating back into the 7th millennium

BC. Much information potentially pertinent to the fixing of an

Indo European Homesite or Urheimat has been done, but the

correlation between sites and speakers has been inconclusive.

For further information on this fascinating area, check this link

for Indo European home-site

In quite a different spirit and a very different climate, the

Missionaries had been active worldwide throughout the 19th

century, following European Empire Builders to every corner ofthe world and spreading the Christian Doctrine. If first stage on

dealing with a new land was to try to get people to wear

underwear, the next was to teach them Bible English and soon

after to translate the Bible into their tongue. Translations were

quickly made and the various Bible Societies got them printed

up and distributed worldwide.

But there was a problem. The zealous translators were following

the patterns of Latin and their European languages, which they

felt went well with the biblical texts as god-given doctrine.

Lacking any real understand of the structure or the languagesthey were translating into, they produced garbled texts,

ridiculous analyses of local grammars, and left no serious marks

of advancement in the science of Linguistics.

It was in quite a different spirit that Edward Sapir at the turn of

the 20th century approached the American Native languages,

which were being corrupted and dying out at an astonishing rate.

A skilled phoneticist, Sapir went everywhere with his pencil and

notebook, tabulating not only sounds which the Western ear


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didn't hear, but also grammatical concepts which the West never

imagined. Born in Pomerania, Sapir knew something about

learning a new speech code, and devoted himself to the

anthropology and linguistics of the Americans with resounding

results. By the time he died in l939 a new school of Linguistics

was in the making, one which drew the blueprint for structure

from the studied language itself. He not only saved priceless

Nootka texts from being lost, but established in his still readable

book of l921 "Language, an Introduction...." a new front for

language study.

Bloomfield followed and consolidated Sapir's work, but it was

WW II which proclaimed a whole new range of "Structuralists",

and for eminently practical reasons. In l940 many people

understood that before the war was over we would have to deal

with dozens, perhaps hundreds of languages for which we had

no prior information. This linguistic preparation for war had to

be done in a hurry, the needs were pressing, and centers were

set up in dozens of American colleges for the study and teaching

of languages, both the common ones and those which were thenrare or exotic. When the war was over, the Structuralists

survived into an academic welter of new views, questionable

hypothesis, avenues which might lead to ultimate answers or

perhaps nowhere at all. In l950 Structuralism was "in", and a

newly trained Ph.D. might have only a rudimentary idea about

19 th century Historical Linguistics.

It was in this mid-century period that we learned to disregard the

proper rules of Grammar, as displayed in Goold Brown's 1102

page "Grammar of English Grammars", 6th ed, New York l862,

and following the advice of the modern Cornell Linguist, welearned to "leave your language alone". Use makes the rule, in

fact there is nothing else which establishes norms and usages

than constant use and public acceptance. It turns out the l8th c.

English "an't" ("is not") was formerly socially acceptable, but in

time as a nasal-twainged "ain't" it became a mark of the

uneducated and the bane of schoolmarms in this country for

generations. But it finally disappeared on its own and is now

rare or used in college circles only for a dialect humorous

emphasis. On the other hand "it don't" is here to stay as a mark

of a stubborn social class-awareness that ain't goin' to cater to

nobody. Words fade in and out of use continually, a processwhich is dependent on use, not rule or reason.

Sometimes there are more complicated lines of reasoning. A

while back we could comfortably use the word "he" to mean

any person, a member of the human race without relation to

gender. But when the women's movement got its speed up, an

immediate target was the ubiquitous male "he". So writers who

wanted their books published soon got to use the rather clumsy

phrase "he or she", or even "he/he" ; or possibly if one were


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arch about it, "(s)he" or better "s(h)e". This obviously could not

last, it was too heavy-handed when repeated, and a way was

found out at last.

The trick was to forget about the Rule of Agreement by

Number, which keeps singular things singular and matches

plurals together. So we began to see "ungrammatical"

arrangements like this:

"In potential civil right situations, a person should be carefulto use proper wording, and be very careful about their respect

for the law."

This is clearly ungrammatical by the old standards, but it does

avoid the verbiage of "his or her respect for the law". I still

avoid this plural pronoun use myself, as many of my generation

will unconsciously do, but I have to admit that it is neater and

tighter than the "he or she" phrase. It may be bad grammar, but

it is growing in use, and I believe this adjustment to sense is

going to be here to stay. In any case, Use makes the Rules, so

we will give it some time and see what a writer in the popularpress will come up with in their future work (!).

Even the names of disciplines were changing. The old German

linguistic term Vergleichende..... became transmuted by its

easier French version "comparee'" into and English

"Comparative", but nobody was ready to call it Linguistics yet.

So English and American colleges taught what they called

Comparative Philology, which was exactly Indo-European

historical linguistics with a more conventional title. In l950

Harvard changed this to Comparative Linguistics, at the demand

of the eminent historical scholar Joshua Whatmough, and asother kinds of linguistic research were added, the program

became finally the work of the Department of Linguistics. This

has evened everywhere, while conservative Classicists

appropriated the term "Philology" to mean the scholarship of the

Classics in the Alexandrian tradition, with no special emphasis

on the development of the new Linguistics. Since Classical

languages are still taught in a thoroughly traditional mode, with

little influence from linguistic research in cognitive studies of the

languages, this title is perhaps unfortunate, but ultimately quite

suitable.

But it is the last half of the 20th century that Linguistics and

linguistic science have exfoliated into dozens new areas, some

of them completely removed from the old philological language-

studies of the previous century. There is such diversity of

interests and techniques that some have questioned whether

there remains a central field of Linguistics, or whether we

should speak of Linguistics hyphenated with another field, such

as anthropology, computer science, practical language

instruction or second-language teaching, etc. Let me mention a


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few of these new directions and areas of activity:

Since W.W.II the missionaries have gone with new enthusiasm

into new developing countries, in the face of problems stemming

from a new set of national consciousnesses. But the new

missionaries know the value of being well trained in language,

and the people trained at many university sites here are fluent,

facile and well based in theoretical linguistics. New bible

translations have replace the clumsy reworkings of yore, andwhere there is success, as in South Korea which is one third

Christianized by now, the results are clear.

If Harvard's Prof. Zipf was largely disregarded as a radical

linguistic eccentric in the l930's, by l960 his work was

incorporated in the index of new mathematical work, along with

the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener, in a project fostered by

Whatmough and the Linguistics Department at Harvard. As the

computer revolution proceeded, it became clear that nobody

could plan a computer- based world without deep use of both

mathematics and linguistics, although a great deal of theancillary writing on computer subjects seems to be written in a

jargon dialect which might well defy linguistic analysis. That

may be part of the cost of living on new frontiers of knowledge.

The great Atlas of American English pioneered and edited by

Hans Kurath opened the way for expanded consciousness of

local speech sub-patterning, exploring area by area the

difference which underlie the "standardized" appearance of

American English. Not only is the Atlas fascinating browsing,

for the nuances of speech patterns which it reveals, it is also the

vehicle by which splits and dividing lines in societies come intorecognition, along with the isogloss lines which have been traced

across every continent from the beginning of time. Research

continues with the definition and elaboration of knowledge

about localisms and dialect differentiation, since the Atlas

tapped only the top of the mine.

Can the historical record of language tell us something about the

society which produced it, about the range of historical

experience? In the mid-19th century various European linguists

proposed the notion that the linguistic record of a group of

languages should show the traits of historical development as thelanguages spread both socially and geographically. It remains

curious that the Indo European language show no single word

for the cat (Skt. marjarah, Gr. ailuros?, Lat. feles, Gmc. catt-)

while dog is abundantly represented (Skt. svan, Gr, kuon, Lat.

canis, Goth. hunds, all connected inexorably be fixed sound-

laws). Horse is oddly represented, for example Skt. asvas beside

Latin equus, but the Gr. hippos has some phonological clouding

and may be a different word, while the word for horse in the

Germanic north is entirely different. It is hard to connect words


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in a web of history without supporting materials, but further

work investigating actual sites with carbon dating methods may

shed some light on some of these chapters of "linguistic history".

People who moved across Europe over a seven thousand year

trek should have left some physical records in campfire and

cave relics, which may correlate with the words they carried in

their trans-European journey.

There is probably no part of the linguistic field which has morepopualr interest than Etymology, which to the Greek coiners of

the term means "true (derivation of) wording", and corresponds

exactly to our notion of Etymology. But etymology in the

Greco- Roman world was likely to be drawn into the realm of

the fanciful, at time toward the fantastic, and does not suit our

notion of "linguistic truth" except in the most basic derivations.

For example, Plato explains the word "methuein" which means

'to be drunk', from the phrase "meta to thuein", which is literally

'after the sacrifice'. The idea was that after a sacrifice the

sacrificial wine was consumed, leading to drunkedness.If a

student came to me with such a derivation I would call itoutlandish; for the redoubtable Plato I find it embarrassing.

But ancient etymologies run this route, and until the "scientific"

linguistic studies of the l9th century etymology is at times

amusing but never informative. I had for years a grand 17th c.

folio volume of Vossius' "Etymologicon Linguae Latinae",

which derived all Latin words from the Greek, and all of these

ultimately to the Hebrew. The astonishing thing is that Voss was

a good language scholar and knew more Greek and Hebrew than

most experts of our time. But he assembled his information

according to a peculiar theological pattern, which rendered hispages of text strewed with columns of learned footnotes

absolutely meaningless.

But by now we have a serious study of the history of words, and

you can find in the German text of Walde Pokorny 3 ed.

incredibly detailed accounts of every Indo European word

known to linguists, with all the abbreviated references to the

vast learned literature. Or for Latin Walde-Hoffman has pages

of small print in German documenting every opinion, right or

wrong, for the IE connections of any Latin word. More readable

in French is Boisacq's Dictionaire Etymologique de la languageGrecque, but less up to date. However these are works for the

advanced linguistic specialist, and when you look for a

derivation in a modern unabridged dictionary, you find bare

bones and very little enlightening argument. The American

Sanskrit scholar W D Whitney wrote the etymologies in the

huge six volume Century Dictionary of l901, which I still find

the best account around, but there are semi-popular sources

which you can generally trust since they generally use good

source materials. Then there are the specialist dictionaries which


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trace Anglo-Indian words imported into English under the

British Empire, and Lokotsch's dictionary of non- IE words in IE

languages, borrowed everywhere from Chinese to Arabic and

Urdu. But the search for the "true meaning" of a word continues

to fascinate us all, a worthy search if you pursue it with some

good grains of salt.

In a somewhat thinly drawn parallel to the newly arrived

carbon-half-life dating which was in the air by l960, Lees atChicago proposed dating of linguistic samples by the rate of

morpheme-deterioration which they showed. The idea was if the

functional units of form, the morphemes, were proved to be

replaced at a given rate, it might be possible to date the origin of

the Indo-European migration of our the Middle East by the rate

of morpheme losses and conversions. A very rough date of the

older scholars for the IE origin was placed at about 10,000 B.C.

and the same date was arrived at by the Rule of Morpheme-

Disintegration. But since both dates were very roughly

calculated, and neither could be scientifically proved, the matter

would seem to rest in limbo. Other have followed this line ofresearch with some considerable refinements, but this new line

of study has not expanded far beyond the work of its own

practitioners.

Phonetics and the exact study of sound has benefited

tremendously from the development of the Sound Spectrograph

during WW II. The days of the old Kymograph with its unsound

ideas and electronics were replaced by a modern, exact

recording machine which traced on paper rolls activity in a

serious of bands representing segments of a sound's ascending

pitches. For human speech this was a rough approximation, andfar too hard to read for use with the deaf, as Bell laboratories

engineers had originally planned. Yet this was a great step from

the l939 "Speech Synthesizer" which was demonstrated at the

NY Worlds' Fair on a machine which looked like a reworked

Hammond organ with keyboard inputs, and sounded less

convincing than an intelligent gorilla in a peeve. By now we

have integrated the knowledge getable from the Sound

Spectrograph into the new world of computer electronics,

leading to the advanced voice-recognition which Ray Kurzweil

was pioneering in l980. Who would have dreamed half a century

ago that you can talk to your computer now and even beunderstood?

Now are these new high technology tools entirely without

impact on education, although there is still much Luddite

resistance to the new in the venerable Halls of Academe. For

many years CALICO at Duke University has been moving

forward with research and practice uses for Computer Aided

Learning in the languages, with research projects, annual

conferences and a growing number of active practitioning


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language teachers. For this work one must be a skilled teacher, a

good solid Linguist, and well versed in computer design and

computer potentials. Considering our ubiquitous fascination for

computers, which suits many situations but may not fit all of

them equally well, we can assume that Computer Aided

Language learning will cut a wider swathe in the increasingly

cost-conscious academic field. But as with all fast-evolving

technology, today's striking successes may well be the burden of

old ideas on tomorrow's shoulders. Witness the general

enthusiasm for the taped "Language Lab" in l960 as the

master-tool for language teaching, a hope which evaporated

within a couple of decades.

The Center for Educational Technology at Middlebury College,

which focuses on linguistic know-how and language teaching, is

a good example of what can be done with imagination, serious

funding, and a sense of the future. By going down to the

bedrock of cognitive theory, the CET may avoid some of the

superficial applications of theory to practice which can cloud

the vision of new work. The people at CET seem to be aware ofthe dangers along with the possibilities.

Beyond the horizon in the realm of speculation about what

Language really is, how it evolved and what it's limitations may

turn out to be, is the terra ignota in which new activity is again

searching for the ultimate information, the final answer. One of

the problems may be that our human use of language is finally

the barrier on which we trip, while trying to get into the next

chamber of the brain, the neural pathways and specialized

receptors which make possible our hearing, deciphering,

generating sounds and using them symbolically for languagecommunication. Using a tool to define that tool is always a

suspect operation and Linguistics may have to deal with that

problem currently.

There is much input of valuable information from people who

have for decades been working with animal intelligence,

especially on the threshold of the use of language of some sort.

The chimpanzee's ability to recognize when well taught, some

hundreds of acoustic signals, and even to reply with signing in

some instances, tells us far more about Language than we are

now prepared to really understand. It is of interest that chimpscan learn hand signing effectively, and some have suspected that

signing is for humans as old or even older than the phonetic

functions of language. There is clear evidence from

entomologists that communication is a significant part of the life

of the insect world. If the dance of the honey bee imparts exact

information, it functions as language even though it has no

acoustic components which we can recognize at this time.

Most striking is the work which has been going on for decades


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now, with the highly intelligent dolphins and their two ranges of

high-low acoustic signaling. Sound spectrographs have been

adjusted to record the entire range of the dolphins' sound

spectrum, which we have the data down on paper to examine.

But we have not yet been able to figure out what the significant

parts are, what sounds are actually "phonematic", and what the

dolphins are saying to each other. Their brains are in a range of

complexity similar to our brains, so we might well expect a

humanoid kind of communication from them. The fact that their

talk is incomprehensible to us may say much about the limits

which our own mental equipment has imposed upon our social

and intellectual use of language qua language.

The Sound Spectrograph has been so heavily used for recording

and analyzing the sounds of the cetaceans, that we might miss its

use in basic Phonetics and understanding the harmonics innate

in the art-language of poetry. I refer you to an essay The Poet

and the Spectrograph which opens an unusual door into the

esthetics of poetry.

We have been so used to thinking of Language as the sole

vehicle for human thought, that we often gloss over the areas

where words simply do not fit the bill. Years ago I brought to a

college seminar some highly spiced Indic relish which none of

the students could have even known. Having them taste it, I

asked for a verbal description, and found either total confusion

on their part or so wide a spread of expressions as to be useless

in definition. Emotions are also very hard to describe beyond a

few basic terms, and we have always somewhat glibly said that

poetry is the language for expressing what words cannot

effectively say. I also note that each time we discover somethingnew, we have to create a new vocabulary for it, whether a

biological entity or a computer process, so the expansion of

vocabulary proceeds exponentially in decades.

On the other hand the "Basic English" project of the l920's

claimed to say anything humanly needed with only 800 available

words, and passages of Shakespeare were "translated" into Basic

with little loss of meaning (although the art and form were

instantly gone). It does seem strange that John Wayne in film

and many highschoolers in this time can get along with a bare

minimum of verbal entities, yet feel they are communicatingwith others on an adequate level. To be sure there are other

modes of communication available, body language, rhythm of

movement in space, and of course the very expressive facial

gesturing. But between the 2000 words you need to survive in a

modern society, and the 20,000 a college graduate has accessed,

and the 75,000 his professors profess to know, beside the million

or so in a current dictionary........ there seems to be a wide gap in

the numerical count. Are all the terms used in Linnaean

identification really necessary, except to a biologist? Is the


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Latinate description of equisetum in a botanical textbook of the

older, pre-fun variety, really enlightening, beside the plant in my

hand which I am examining with care before microtoming

sections for the microscope? Is the forest richer for having

names for the flowers and birds, or is this just a part of our

in-built mania for putting a tag on everything, so that we can

almost algebraically refer to it without actually touching it with

our hands.

Language works with sound, or graphemically with written

signs, to put tags on things, so we can use language as a kind of

shorthand to catalog the materials of the world, objects and

ideas alike. Tagging gives the feeling of understanding

something, but can be a cheap way of dealing with multiple data

conveniently, often without further thinking. Since the beginning

of our history, men have tried to get beyond language, the holy

men who vowed silence as a way of emptying the spirit of the

inconsequential, the hermit went to the top of the mountain to

contemplate life without words. There has always been a contest

between the word and the spirit, and although the word usuallywins out in our social framework, the spirit remains there

beckoning us on uncannily. Perhaps there is something limiting

about language which we have not yet learned to estimate

accurately, perhaps there is something limiting about the

biological and neural part of our mental equipment so we (being

word conscious) cannot find the words to express everything.

These things too, must be part of the remarkable discipline

which we call Linguistics, because this is on the forefront of our

interface with the world as well as with each other.

William Harris

Prof. Em. Middlebury College

www.middlebury.edu/~harris


linguistics_ an overview

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