#Linguist blogs update#
#Linguist blogs free#

This is history this is popular thinking, and to seek to make purely scientific statements while ignoring the destruction and victimization of indigenous peoples is careless at best and hateful at worst. Don Frantz once related a story where when he told a local shop owner that he was studying the Blackfoot language, the owner told him that the Blackfeet did not have a language, 'just a bunch of grunts'. The saying that all language are equally complex arose because people used linguistic analysis as a racist tool to denigrate and victimize indigenous peoples. While I might agree that we should strive to be utterly scientific (and saying something sweeping like 'all languages are equally complex' is not very provable or scientific), I think it's even more important to think about the negative ramifications of things that we say. Now, I doubt the author would agree with what I've just said if pressed, but it is literally the logically inescapable conclusion of that last sentence. Let me say that again: he disagrees that lesser-spoken languages are primitive, and he also disagrees that all language are equal, but he says that it's better to believe that lesser-spoken languages are primitive. He even goes so far as to say that though he disagrees both with the popular notion that 'primitive people speak primitive languages' and with the linguistics teaching that all language are equally complex, 'linguists have fallen into the more serious error'.

The author takes an entire chapter to essentially deconstruct the widely held linguistic notion that all languages are 'equally complex'. On a more negative note, Chapter 5 of this book almost made me put it down for good.

I would be very interested if anyone knows of any exceptions - languages with only three basic color terms that do not include red as one of the color terms.) This part of the book is written clearly enough and provides enough helpful examples that I actually used it in my own teaching several times, as a content unit about colors for ESL classes. (While there are exceptions to some of the predictions, the one just stated is as far as I know exceptionless. A language with just two colors will divide them into dark and light, and a language with three colors will always have red as the third color. These approaches began as mostly racist caricatures and progressed to the seminal Berlin & Kay work that established a (mostly) definite order of color acquisition that with very few exceptions predicts which color terms a language will have based on its number of colors terms. I found the first half of this book to be the most compelling, providing a lot of history about how philologists and then linguists approached the question of color across cultures. Blackfoot has one word for blue/green, while Arabic has completely separate words for dark blue and light blue. Of course (and as this book points out), languages in fact vary widely in how many color terms they have. I've found that many people aren't really interested in color terms cross-linguistically because they assume that such analysis is merely providing translations. The primary approach throughout is an analysis of how languages describe color. The basic idea of this book ('Through the Language Glass: Why the world looks different in other languages' by Guy Deutscher) is to examine the premise that the language we speak influences how we interpret the world.

#Linguist blogs free#

If for some reason you are interested in reading more of my writing, feel free to check out my new (technology/science) blog Less Than Twelve Parsecs over on Wordpress.ĭisclaimer: I was sent a free review copy of this book. I still plan to post occasionally, but it will probably be mostly reviews like this one rather than more standard blog posts. I am no longer in linguistics and though my 6 years in the field leaves me with significant interest, I no longer devote significant time to this blog.

#Linguist blogs update#

Announcements: For anyone who still follows this blog, I should probably mention in a more official capacity that I don't really update anymore (in case you hadn't noticed).