Language Files

[Beverly Flanigan]

How sad!  But I still have the 1st edition, plus three or four later ones;
my TAs use them all the time.  I MUST make more copies of the audiotapes
soon though, before I lose more; I can send you copies if you wish (maybe I
should send Brian a set too!).

Personally, I like the later LFs less than the earlier ones; they've become
too discursive and less workbookish.  Even Brian says the students find
them dryasdust.  We use Fromkin, Rodman, & Hyams, with exercises from LF
plus our own made-up ones.  This fall though, I'm switching in my own
section to _Relevant Linguistics_, out of Stanford's CSLI; were you part of
that project?  Any thoughts on it?

And finally, thanks for the heads-up on storing materials in the
library.  Since I face this a year from now, I'll have to be realistic
about how much they can reasonably take, I guess.

At 10:40 AM 7/27/2004 -0700, you wrote:
>On Jul 26, 2004, at 10:27 AM, Beverly Flanigan wrote:
>
>>...BTW, the audiotapes accompanying LF are priceless, and I've had
>>them for years.  But when I was at OSU a couple of years ago and asked
>>for a replacement for one I had lost (on the Ten Top Languages of the
>>World--anyone have it?), Brian Joseph said they could no longer find
>>them!  What a loss.
>
>sigh.  here you see the down side of running the Language Files as a
>cottage industry, with new sets of people preparing each edition;
>there's nobody responsible for maintaining continuity, keeping files,
>etc.  meanwhile, offices get moved around, the department moves to a
>new building, the staff at OSU Press changes, and so on.  things get
>lost, or thrown away in housecleaning fits.
>
>when i left ohio state (physically; i still have an emeritus
>appointment there) in 1998, rather than truck this stuff across the
>country, i donated to the department library my complete set of Intro
>to Language materials, going back to the early '70s (collections of
>loose-leaf files, hence the name "Language Files") and including copies
>of all the editions (including a preliminary one) of LF.  not long
>after, the department library was disbanded (to make more space), and
>its contents were given to the OSU main library, which discarded
>material it had no use for.  obviously it had no use for outdated
>editions of a book it already had several copies of.  i tried to get
>someone to save the LF stuff and ship it back to me (at my expense),
>but apparently my appeal came too late.
>
>so now i have none of it, except the two most recent editions.  no
>tapes.  and a piece of the historical record is lost.
>
>arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), who started the whole thing 30+
>years ago