If what is said is not what is meant. Language is the only vehicle of ideas; if it breaks down, what happens to the ideas? …For the English language has been spreading around the civilized world at an unprecedented rate since World War II. It has become in fact the international language, the lingua franca of trade, of science and diplomacy. The future of civilization may depend on a consensus of thought that can only be achieved by a precise … Continue reading
Language is the only vehicle of ideas; if it breaks down, what happens to the ideas?… The curse of the Structural Linguists. The Structural Linguists, in their relativistic approach toward standards of usage, confused the relationship between language and thought. Concentrated and coherent thought is impossible without the vessel of … Continue reading
…How to freeze a caste system while professing only the purest democratic principles… To almost anyone who respects the English language for its grace and beauty, its combination of precision and flexibility, the social philosophy of the Structural Linguists seemed almost incomprehensible. They epitomized the “anti-intellectualism of the intellectual.” For … Continue reading
The apostles of Structural Linguistics might still have confined their interests to the teaching of foreign languages had it not been for the extremely influential work of Professor Charles Carpenter Fries of the University of Michigan, a prolific writer who in 1940 published “a scientifically oriented description of actual usage.” … Continue reading
The Linguistic credo was that it was undemocratic to attack “incorrect” English… Leonard Bloomfield’s egalitarian theories of education, in essence, insisted that “correct” or “good” English was a form of social snobbery perpetuated by the “fanciful doctrine” swallowed by an American public eager to climb the social ladder.” Though Bloomfield’s … Continue reading
A faint notion of the rarefied realms in which Structural Linguists operated, and the mode in which they wrote, could be easily grasped through a random sampling of the style. From Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky ( 1957): When transformational analysis is properly formulated we find that it is essentially … Continue reading
…An abstruse discipline, based on Stone Age cultures is applied to our own language… The primary interest of the linguistician, however, is the sound of language; and it is in the field of phonetics- or, more specifically, phonemics, that Structural Linguistics erected its most elaborate methodological edifice. The starting point … Continue reading
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