From: fournet.arnaud
Message: 58575
Date: 2008-05-18
----- Original Message -----
From: "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, May 18, 2008 10:47 AM
Subject: [tied] For MKelkar, Kishore and all those other anti-linguists
from Roy Andrew Miller:
Languages and History
Japanese, Korean, and Altaic,
Acknowledgments
>On 15 December 1989 I terminated my employment at the University of
>Washington in Seattle. During most of the ca. two decades that I
>worked there, several circumstances had made it increasingly difficult
>for me to conduct research on the history of Japanese and Korean. In
>particular, studies that, like those which interested me, involved
>issues of historical linguistics and philological investigation
>confronted an increasingly hostile reception from both university
>administration and colleagues, and the resulting atmosphere of
>distrust and jealousy mitigated against the accomplishment of most
>scientific work, my own included.
===========
Is this not just the result of what as I perceive as a general lack of
interest for history in the USA ?
Arnaud
===========
>In the United States the virtually unchallenged ascendancy of the
>Chomskyite linguistic paradigm has swept everything else before it.
>'Linguistics' has come to mean nothing more than the superficial
>scrutiny of certain, and frequently atypical, syntactic structures,
>which are then 'studied' by comparing and contrasting the way in which
>they actually appear in a given language ('surface structure') with
>the way in which the investigator imagines they might ideally appear
>if the language under investigation were really English ('deep
>structure').
=========
Is the Chomskyite brainwash not on the wane ?
I heard that people are rediscovering what linguistics is about ?
False news ?
Arnaud
=======
> The Neogrammarian tradition and principles had,
> through no fault of their own, become
>entangled and embroiled in the fatally evil racist myths of the Third
>Reich; and too many young scholars and even younger students of
>Japanese and Korean had attempted to 'wipe the slate clean' by
>expunging all memory of the once-great German university traditions in
>such studies.
=============
I 'm sorry to say that I do believe in the heavy responsibilities
of most German linguists and more generally
of most German learned persons in the birth of the Nazi ideology.
And this did not start in 1933.
Actually, Bopp vainly protested against the word Indo-Germanisch
which is the beginning of the big problem :
a kind of ethnocultural and political holdup on a linguistic concept
that was THERE from the start (1800) in Germany.
And Meillet's book about "les langues germaniques"
got a very hostile reception
because it was just pointing at the fact that the Germanic languages
are NOT pristinely close to PIE.
An obvious fact that sounded scandalous one century ago.
Nevertheless,
It's not a reason to throw everything overboard.
I still think the study of the intellectual roots of Nazism has to be made,
and it must include a chapter about paleo-linguistics.
Biographies of Hitler are instrumental,
they do not explain why and since when the seeds were germinating.
Arnaud
===========
>But that was during the Third Reich, when most of what we
>were taught was nonsense; and I've always assumed that Grimm's Law and
>all that was Nazi nonsense as well.'
=======
The absence of sorting out between evil and good
is a way not to look at the evil.
This is also part of the problem mentioned above.
Arnaud
===========
>But, as my friend at the Nymphenburg so clearly
>indicated, a whole generation of Germans now believed - mistakenly but
>none the less firmly - that the comparative method of the
>Neogrammarians somehow had something to do with the Third Reich 'and
>all that Nazi nonsense'.
======
The method does not
The people do.
Arnaud
==========