Re: THEORY: Question: Bound Morphemes

Christophe Grandsire wrote:

>  But it [thinking of text as as important as speech] is not
> linguistics.
Why should it not be?

> The language and its written counterpart are very
> different things and confusing them is a mistake.
Agreed.

> And when we are talking
> of points of structure like the nature of 'the', it is its use in
> speech that is important, not its use in writing.
Why?

> The written language is only a
> (generally false) representation of an oral reality that is the
> language in itself, so it is irrelevant when talking of the
> structure of a language
I don't believe this follows.

First, it is far too simplistic to say that writing is a "false"
representation of speech.  If what you mean is that writing is a more
slender channel of information, because it leaves out a lot of
information-transmitting qualities which exist in speech, then you are
correct.  On the other hand, human communication *as a whole,* whether
in speech or text, is a matter of transmitting only a small amount of
information and expecting the rest to be inferred from context and
circumstance, so in this respect, speech and writing are different in
degree and not in kind.

> (as if an entomologist studied only dead butterflies hung on a table
> to understand the behaviour of butterflies).
Your analogy here *assumes*, rather than *arguing*, that the proper
study of linguistics is speech, and that writing is not "really"
language.  It would be interesting to know whether you could argue
this point by any means other than defining it to be true and
asserting that is the correct definition.

> Even with dead languages, the
> first work of a linguist is to find out what the written evidence
> represented, and where the written evidence was different from the
> oral reality (think of the written Latin which is very different
> from the oral Latin that gave birth to the Romance languages).
Perhaps; perhaps not.  That rather depends on the linguist's
purposes, does it not?  And I am not convinced that the written
Classical Latin we have is so terribly, terribly different than the
spoken Latin employed by certain classes of Romans at certain times.
Surely it is different from the speech of the vast majority of Romans
at the vast majority of times and places, and that's why we don't
reconstruct Classical Latin but Proto-Romance.  But I don't think this
has anything to do with an essential difference between writing and
speech.

+ Ed Heil ---------------------- edheil@postmark.net +
|    "What matter that you understood no word!       |
|    Doubtless I spoke or sang what I had heard      |
|           In broken sentences."  --Yeats           |
+----------------------------------------------------+