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Author Archives: Dave
Babel of babble: by words we govern
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 … Continue reading
the word: gracefully conceived
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. … Continue reading
freeze a caste system
…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 … Continue reading
Apostles of a new order: structural linguistics
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 … Continue reading
undemocratic to attack “incorrect” English
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion
Tagged André Kertész, Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, Malcolm X, Zellig S. Harris
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Structural Linguists: rareified style
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion
Tagged Alfred Korzybski, Iggy Pop, Leonard Bloomfield, Noam Chomsky, William Burroughs
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structural linguistics: stone age language
…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 … Continue reading
say look: what’s that sound?
To begin with, the Structural Linguists concern themselves only with the spoken language. The generally low esteem with which they regard writing derives in part from the statistic that only about five per cent of the of the world’s approximately … Continue reading
usage is all that counts
From the study of primitive tongues, linguisticians dervied a rule: usage is all that counts… IN the United States the great anthropologist Franz Boaz of Columbia University made extensive studies between 1897 and 1908 of the languages of various American … Continue reading
what came first: the structure or the grammar?
Linguistics began to evolve from philology in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and the most important events occurred in France and Russia. In Paris a young scholar named Ferdinand de Saussure ( 1857-1913) conceived the idea that structure, … Continue reading
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