Re: Book: Lunatic Lovers of Language

At 6:22 am -0700 21/4/00, Barry Garcia wrote:
>CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU writes:
>>Thanks, Sally, I think you've answered Barry's two questions below:
>>
>No, no, dear Ray :). Actually, I was pretty much the first to reply to the
>original question :). T'wasn't me who asked!
Sorry - well, whoever it was asked the questions, Sally's reply answered
the questions pretty well, I think.
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At 10:28 am -0700 21/4/00, Sally Caves wrote:
[....]
> As I continued,
>I saw that she had a real chip on her shoulder about language inventors
>and usurpation, that it was a goal of the book to restore linguistics to
>the real linguists (hence the section called "In Defence of Natural
>Languages").
I get students wih chips on their shoulders - with them one can often
sympathasize; they are still young & in many ways immature & one can
positively help them come to terms with the problem, or even discover that
there's really no problem (the chips often come about because of some bad
school experience).

But this woman is supposed to be a grown adult, an intelligent academic.
Does she really think natural languages are under threat.  Some are,
indeed, like Breton under threat from her native French - but does she
really think French is under threat? If it is, the threat is another
natural language, English, not any conlang!

>I really take her to task in my on-line article, but I
>also fault Jeffrey Schnapp, medievalist and Hildegard specialist, for
>simply repeating her insults as though they are gospel.
I agree - simply repeating a source as tho gospel without doing any cross
checking is pure, simple laziness in my book.

[....]
>
>She hasn't done her homework, Ray.  She loftily ignores J.R.R. Tolkien,
>an omission that is patently curious, especially since she devotes a
>special chapter to science fiction writers like Jack Vance and Samuel
>Delaney.
I guess JRRT would've have spoilt her male-female dichotomy thing.

> _Native Tongue_ had already come out by Suzette Haden Elgin
>and she ignores that, and the publication of _Fous du langage_ and
>Elgin's _Laadan_ coincided; so that may explain why Yaguello ignores
>her.  But it would have been convenient to ignore this woman linguist
>and conlanger if what one wants to say is that woman's "language
>invention" is lunatic, hysterical, infantile, and best represented by
>a half-baked medium (Helene Smith) who claimed to be speaking Martian
>and was really only redesigning French.
It certainly would've been.  But there had been other woman conlangers
about.  One of the co-developers of Glosa is a woman.  The fact that one
has to research harder to find women conlangers of the past is IMHO far
more to do with the econmomic position of women in society than anything
else.  But that does not excuse an academic for not doing the research.  To
pick only one case & then base a thesis on that is just plain bad
methodology.

[...]
>
>Not only that, it's dreadfully cute.  "I'm not making this up," she
>says, and other chirpy things.
I know - like when someone being interviewed makes a great point of being
open & honest: one knows that it's going to be followed by a lie.  If she's
not making it up, but presenting good, solid research, that should IMHO be
obvious without the author having to tell us so.

IME once an author says something like "I'm not making this up" one can be
pretty sure that that is exactly what s/he is doing  :)

>A lot of it is just airy fairy lit-crit
>maunderings.  I really resent the book, I wonder if you can tell! <G>
I'd sort of got that impression  ;)

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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