Re: Sh!

Quoting Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>:

> I read to today that the use of [S:] as an interjection to tell people to
> be quite is common to all languages of the world. Then, newspaper articles
> aren't known for being completely reliable on lingusitic matters*, so do
> any of the real linguists or knowledgeable amateurs on the list know how true
> this is.
Well, I doubt it. (It just sounds silly.)

> * I once read an article that denied the validity of the Indoeuropean
> grouping.
This was once the official line of the Soviet State, in fact.
Marrist linguistics insisted that there were no such things as
genetic groupings at all, only typological similarities.  (At
the time, it was not quite as crack-pot as it sounds:  Trubetskoy,
an otherwise well-respected phonologist, once offered a similar
theory only for the IE languages.)  One of the readings I had
in Georgian was written during the period when Marr was ascendent,
and wriggles its way around a flawed orthodoxy by calling the
Kartvelian languages "geneaologically" related. (IIRC, calling
languages "genetically" related was a capital crime.)

> Interesting idea, but somewhat marred by the authors apparent
> belief that the linguistic grouping could be disproved by showing the
> IE-speakers don't form a biologically recognizable group. He also indicated
> that anyone who believes in the IE grouping is most probably a racist.
Well... given that Indo-European linguistics was hijacked by
the Nazis, who did use it to support their racial agendas, the
claim, while wrong, is at least not ludicrous, historically speaking.

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Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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