Re: CHAT: Back on the list; Anti-conlanging bigots

--- Tom Wier wrote:

In other news, I'm enjoying school here at UofC (especially the
weekly Teas held by the department).  Only a couple of bad notes
since moving to Chicago.  Not having known anyone here, I tend
to jabber on about what I know, which mostly means my previous
life in Texas.  The knowledge of most people here about Texas
is so poor as to be mere caricature, but they're mostly nice
and don't mean anything by it.  I've only met two anti-Texan
bigots.  But that's not the worst of it.  Our syntax class is
run along the expected Government and Binding program, which is
fine as long as you like sticking things in little boxes. Anyways,
one day we were discussing how GB handles case marking, and the
question arose whether there are any languages whose adpositions
assign nominative case.  I mentioned that I knew off the top of my
head of no natural languages which marked case in that way, though
I did know of a constructed language that did this.  At this my
professor (who's only six years older than me) did a double
take, and said "What?" with a confused look on his face.  I
clarified that Esperanto did this, but before I could explain
myself, he let a great groan and said "Ohhh" and turned to the
board in what appeared to be disgust, as if I had just said
something profoundly ignorant.  My point had been, of course,
that Esperanto is the exception that proves the rule:  you almost
*have* to go to constructed languages to find an example of
adpositions marking nominative case. Unfortunately, I never got
a chance to explain that to him, because I didn't feel that it
was a particularly relevant point to our larger discussion, and
didn't want to get into a petty argument with someone who shares
the profession's marked hostility to conlanging.  (He's a nice guy,
but tends to be distinctly doctrinaire about all things Chomskyan,
and takes himself and linguistics way too seriously.)  It's too
bad, really, since that attitude has infected some of my fellow
first-year gradstudents who consider conlanging trite, but are
apparently too polite to admit it.
--- end of quote ---

I hope you don't take this episode as indicative of the feelings of generative
syntacticians in general. The vast majority of us aren't nearly that uptight,
and I know of no "marked hostility to conlanging" in my field. Sure, there are
linguists who treat conlanging as an amusing and inconsequential game--but that
kind of patronising attitude is hardly confined to linguists, nor is it
characteristic of the discipline, at least in my experience.

I know several people in my former department (UCLA--as Chomskyan as you can get
outside of MIT) who have indulged in conlanging to some degree or another: The
late Vicki Fromkin is the most famous example. Also Tim Stowell, who's as
orthodox a generativist as you can get. Then there are several grad students
and former grad students with conlanging interests, including one who speaks
Esperanto and attends the international Esperanto conference every year (he and
I hosted an "Incubus" party at my house last year).

Another UCLA grad student, John Foreman, was recently awarded special funding to teach
a special honours seminar on constructed languages as a window to understanding
the structure of natural language. Here's the website, in case anyone's
interested:

  http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/grads/jforeman/collegium/collegium.htm

He sent me a list of the contents of the course reader:

Aliens and Linguists by Walter E. Meyers
"Pinocchio" by Stanley Schmidt
"The Signals" by Francis A. Cartier
"Omnilinguals" by H. Beam Piper
Chapter 2 of The Language Imperative by Suzette Haden Elgin
Chapter 3 of The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
"The Principles of Newspeak," Appendix to 1984 by George Orwell
Chapter 7 of The Language Imperative by Suzette Haden Elgin
Afterword by Stanley Edgar Hyman for A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
"Uncleftish Beholdings (from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle)" by Poul Anderson

On another note, I'm somewhat suprised to hear that you're getting 'orthodox'
generativism in your syntax class at the University of Chicago. I tend to
associate Chicago with Michael Silverstein and the Functionalist crowd. (The
taking-oneself-too-seriously part doesn't surprise me, though...)

Matthew Pearson
Department of Linguistics
Reed College
3203 SE Woodstock Blvd
Portland, OR 97202
503 771 1112 x 7618

Replies