What Bloomfield said.

[David Costa]

Hockett in the intro to Bloomfield's Menominee grammar, page vii:

"Bloomfield was speaking of the tremendous difficulty of obtaining a really adequate of any language, and suggested, half humorously, that linguists dedicated to this task should not get married, nor teach: instead they should take a vow of celibacy, spend as long a summer as feasible each year in the field, and spend the winter collating and filing the material. With this degree of intensiveness, Bloomfield suggested, a linguist could perhaps produce good accounts of three languages in his lifetime".

I should point out that Bloomfield didn't do this much, either. 

Dave


> > Don't feel too bad about this. As Bloomfield famously said, it is almost impossible to document one language in a lifetime, and you have documented two.  
> 
> Let me paraphrase what Bloomfield actually said, since I'd have to go to the library to get the exact wording:  If a linguist devotes every Summer to collecting field data and every Winter to processing those data, AND REMAINS CELIBATE, he may "turn to account three languages" in a lifetime.
> 
> Needless to say, I'm not even closing in on two.
> 
> Bob
> 
> P.S. If I recollect rightly, the original Bloomfield passage is from the introduction to his Menominee Grammar (but I could be corrected on the source.  It could be the Ojibwa grammar and the quote could be Hockett quoting Bloomfield.).

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