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linguisticians)</title></head><body>
<div>At 10:24 AM -0500 3/6/01, Fred Shapiro wrote:</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>On Tue, 6 Mar 2001, Laurence Horn
wrote:<br>
<br>
> I didn't find any egregious errors in the ms., but I did note
several<br>
> of my favorite quotes missing--I don't know if they snuck them
into<br>
> the published (cis-Atlantic) version, or if they ignored my
comments<br>
> and just reprinted the Penguin version.<br>
<br>
If you want to share your favorite quotes that are missing, I'd love
to</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>hear about them.<br>
</blockquote>
<div>Here are the relevant paragraphs from my reader's report.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><font
color="#000000"><x-tab>
</x-tab>In terms of inclusiveness, my first impression is that
virtually every quote that ought to be included was included. I
began by checking for some of my favorites, lines I've used as
epigraphs or as<i> mots</i> in class lectures-Max Weinreich's
observation that a language is a dialect with an army and navy, T. S.
Eliot's on the interminable wrestle with words and meanings,
Whitman's boast that he contradicts himself and contains
multitudes, Humpty Dumpty on the meaning of words (a favorite
citation of lawyers as well as linguists) and a couple of lines from
Shakespeare-and they were all right where they should be. But
when I continued, I began to notice some odd gaps and what I would
consider lapses, although it occurs to me that probably no such
compilation will be complete, any more than (say) a particular
version of Bartlett's or competing general compilations of
quotations will be. I will give a couple of examples of these
lapses by way of illustration.<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>John Stuart Mill's observation that "the
structure of every sentence is a lesson in logic", which I have
used as the epigraph of my home page on the Web, is curiously absent,
although a related quote from Churchill ("I got into my bones
the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence-which is a
wonderful thing") is present. The Crystals include an
excellent line of Horace's, of which I am quite fond, in both the
Latin ("Brevis esse laboro/Obscurus fio") and English
("I struggle to be brief, I become obscure"), situating it
in their useful "Saying just enough" section, but the
equally apropos comments by Aristotle and by the rhetorician
Quintilian (both of whom are generously excerpted elsewhere in the
volume) are missing: <br>
<br>
<font face="Times">If it is prolix, it will not be clear, nor if it
is too brief. It is plain that the middle way is
appropriate..., saying just enough to make the facts plain.<br>
<x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab>(Aristotle,<i> Rhetoric,</i> 3.12-3.16)<br>
<br>
Personally, when I use the term brevity<i> [brevitas],</i> I mean not
saying less, but not saying more than the occasion demands.<br>
<x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab>(Quintilian,<i> Institutio Oratio,</i> IV.ii.41-43)<br>
<br>
</font>This led me to wonder whether the Crystals at times may have
relied too heavily on Bartlett's, where one will find the Churchill
but not the Mill, and the Horace but not the Quintilian or Aristotle
lines. I also missed this wonderful line from the otherwise
well-represented Dr. Johnson:<br>
<br>
<font face="Times">Words being arbitrary must owe their power to
association, and have the influence, and that only, which custom has
given them. Language is the dress of
thought.<x-tab> </x-tab>(Samuel Johnson,<i> Life of
Cowley</i>)<br>
<br>
</font>Under the category of Translation, I didn't find the classic
Synge line "A translation is no translationŠunless it will
give you the music of a poem along with the words of it" (also
missing from the same source,<i> Playboy of the Western World,</i> is
the interesting claim that "There is no language like the Irish
for soothing and quieting"), and while I successfully located
the much-quoted Italian proverb ("Traduttore, traditore")
in 13:47, the Crystals inexplicably present it only in English
("Translators, traitors"), where the pun that animates it
is gone. I don't believe I've ever seen this quoted in
English, only in Italian. Another curious lapse is Saussure's
dictum that a language is "un système où tout se
tient." Again, this is virtually always cited in French
(and frequently so), but it appears in the Crystals' compilation in
the almost unrecognizable and far less memorable English rendering:
"language is a system of interdependent terms"
(16:60). I find it surprising that a linguist,
encyclopedist and popularizer as sophisticated and accomplished as
David Crystal (I confess I'm not previously familiar with Hilary
Crystal's work) would have the tin ear to represent these lines
only in translation, where they lose much of their
effect.</font></div>
<div><font
color="#000000"><x-tab>
</x-tab>This being said, I am happy to report that to the best of my
ability to check, the citations for the quotes that do appear are
accurate and complete, and I am quite willing to concede that my
quibbles on which quotations are (and are not) included and how they
are presented are matters on which reasonable linguists can and
almost certainly will differ.</font></div>
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<div>larry</div>
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