<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>Hockett in the intro to Bloomfield's Menominee grammar, page vii:</div><div><br></div>"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".<div><br></div><div>I should point out that Bloomfield didn't do this much, either. </div><div><br></div><div>Dave</div><div><div><br></div><div><div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite">
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> 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.
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<font face="Arial" size="3">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,
<b>AND REMAINS CELIBATE</b>, he may "turn to account three languages" in a lifetime.<br>
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Needless to say, I'm not even closing in on two.<br>
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Bob<br>
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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.).</font><br>
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