[Lingtyp] languages of scholarship

Fri Jun 26 10:07:59 UTC 2020

Yes, Nigel, but as you know: In the 16th-17th century, English was 
irrelevant because Latin was the language of scholarship in Europe.

In the 18th century, English was irrelevant because French was the 
language of scholarship.

In the 19th century, English was irrelevant because German was the 
primary language of linguistics (it was Karl Ferdinand Becker, for 
example, who made the distinction between "subject" and "object" popular).

So looking at the OED gives a wrong impression – it appears to project 
the current supremacy of English back into the past. (Apparently, the 
established Latin term "concord" needed to be explained to English readers.)

That's one of the reasons why we should call out common language 
"Globish". There's no real continuity with "English".

Martin

Am 26.06.20 um 11:58 schrieb Nigel Vincent:
> But the term 'agreement' has been around in writings about grammar for 
> centuries. Here is the relevant entry from the OED:
>
>
>       *6.* /Grammar/. The fact or condition of agreeing in number,
>       gender, case, person, etc., with another element in the sentence
>       or clause. Cf. concord n.^1 6
>       <https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/38345#eid8665709>.
>
> 1549 W. Lily /Shorte Introd. Gram./ (new ed.) To Rdr. sig. Aiii Lette 
> hym passe to the Concordes, to knowe the agreement of partes amonge 
> theim selues.
> 1669 J. Milton /Accedence/ 41   The agreement of words together in 
> Number, Gender, Case, and Person, which is call'd Concord.
> 1787 H. Blair /Lect. Rhetoric/ (ed. 3) I. viii. 200   When I say, in 
> Latin, ‘Formosa fortis viri uxor’, it is only the agreement, in 
> gender, number, and case, of the adjective ‘formosa’..with the 
> substantive ‘uxor’..that declares the meaning.
> 1879 J. A. H. Murray in /Trans. Philol. Soc./ 619   In the English 
> ‘the men push the stone,’ we have neither formal expression of the 
> destination [of the action] nor formal agreement of verb and subject.
> 1979 /Amer. Speech 1976/ *51* 134   Of the nine problems covered, 
> subject-verb agreement receives a thorough treatment.
> 2004 H. Barber et al. in M. Carreiras & C. Clifton /On-line Study 
> Sentence Comprehension/ xv. 315 Agreement in gender between nouns and 
> adjectives is mandatory in Spanish.
>
>
> Professor Nigel Vincent, FBA MAE
> Professor Emeritus of General & Romance Linguistics
> The University of Manchester
>
> Linguistics & English Language
> School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
> The University of Manchester
>
>
>
> https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/researchers/nigel-vincent(f973a991-8ece-453e-abc5-3ca198c869dc).html
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf 
> of Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>
> *Sent:* Friday, June 26, 2020 11:43 AM
> *To:* lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org 
> <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> *Subject:* Re: [Lingtyp] languages of scholarship
> Maybe if you're Danish (like Hartmut and Nigel), or were otherwise 
> raised in some small (and rich) European country, then understanding 
> many of these languages is kind of natural.
>
> But somehow asking *all linguists* to be like this seems Eurocentric 
> to me. Korean/Chinese linguists (like Ian Joo) or African linguists 
> will simply not have the chance to encounter so many languages in 
> which other linguists have written relevant work. (In Africa, even big 
> languages like Hausa and Yoruba are rarely used for academic purposes, 
> it seems.)
>
> On the other hand, it's also ethnocentric to only cite work by 
> American linguists and somehow assume that there is nothing else of 
> relevance.
>
> So what's the solution? I think it must be (i) practical universalism 
> (only use English/Globish), combined with (ii) awareness of the 
> parochialism of English-language traditions.
>
> As an example of the latter, consider the term "agreement": As I 
> realized only after reading Cysouw (2011) 
> (https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/17668/1/thli.2011.011.pdf), this term 
> did not exist in linguistics before Bloomfield (1933), and the 
> relevant concepts didn't exist earlier either. Same with "grammatical 
> relation" (due to Chomsky 1965), "focus" (due to Chomsky 1970), and 
> quite a few other terms. Natural as these terms seem to us, they may 
> not be the results of scientific discoveries that we made, but mostly 
> due to the spread of the English language (and the influence of a few 
> linguists working at rich U.S. universities).
>
> Universalism and parochialism are in a certain tension, but I think we 
> really need to adopt both at the same time if we want to progress in 
> our scientific understanding of language(s).
>
> Martin
>
> Am 26.06.20 um 11:22 schrieb Hartmut Haberland:
>>
>> Et si l'article porte sur le grec moderne, il doit souvent se référer 
>> à la tradition grammaticale grecque (Tzartzanos) ou française 
>> (Roussel, Mirambel). Restricting oneself to discourses in /one/ 
>> language is myopic. Most linguists really need to read more than just 
>> two or three languages to keep up with the relevant literature, but 
>> how many do?
>>
>> (Robert E. Wall said in the famous McCawley Festschrift, “More people 
>> can make out what it is about in French than actually read it”.)
>>
>> To take a concrete example: /Acta Linguistica Hafniensia /was founded 
>> in 1939 and its first issue contained papers in German, French and 
>> English. Today, it still calls itself an ‘international journal’, but 
>> now practically all papers are in English, with very few exceptions. 
>> However, if you take a random issue (51(1), May 2019), apart from one 
>> paper specifically dealing with English, there are references to 
>> literature in German, French, Greek, Norwegian, and Swedish. So 
>> linguists are at least not passively monolingual.
>>
>> Hartmut Haberland
>>
>> *Fra:*Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> 
>> <mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> *På vegne af 
>> *Nigel Vincent
>> *Sendt:* 26. juni 2020 10:04
>> *Til:* Wiemer, Bjoern <wiemerb at uni-mainz.de> 
>> <mailto:wiemerb at uni-mainz.de>; Gilles Authier 
>> <gilles.authier at gmail.com> <mailto:gilles.authier at gmail.com>
>> *Cc:* lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org 
>> <mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
>> *Emne:* Re: [Lingtyp] languages of scholarship
>>
>> Et si l'article est sur une langue romane mais les références jugées 
>> indispensables sont écrites en allemand ou en danois … ?
>>
>> Professor Nigel Vincent, FBA MAE
>> Professor Emeritus of General & Romance Linguistics
>> The University of Manchester
>>
>> Linguistics & English Language
>> School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
>>
>> The University of Manchester
>>
>> https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/researchers/nigel-vincent(f973a991-8ece-453e-abc5-3ca198c869dc).html
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> *From:*Wiemer, Bjoern <wiemerb at uni-mainz.de 
>> <mailto:wiemerb at uni-mainz.de>>
>> *Sent:* Friday, June 26, 2020 9:44 AM
>> *To:* Gilles Authier <gilles.authier at gmail.com 
>> <mailto:gilles.authier at gmail.com>>; Nigel Vincent 
>> <nigel.vincent at manchester.ac.uk <mailto:nigel.vincent at manchester.ac.uk>>
>> *Cc:* lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org 
>> <mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> 
>> <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org 
>> <mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>>
>> *Subject:* AW: [Lingtyp] languages of scholarship
>>
>> Je pense que oui… Actually, the same applies to articles on (a 
>> language from) other language groups (e.g., Slavic) or subgroups 
>> (e.g., Scandinavian)…
>>
>> BW
>>
>> *Von:*Lingtyp [mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] *Im 
>> Auftrag von *Gilles Authier
>> *Gesendet:* Freitag, 26. Juni 2020 09:35
>> *An:* Nigel Vincent <nigel.vincent at manchester.ac.uk 
>> <mailto:nigel.vincent at manchester.ac.uk>>
>> *Cc:* lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org 
>> <mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
>> *Betreff:* Re: [Lingtyp] languages of scholarship
>>
>> Si l'article est sur une langue romane et que les références jugées 
>> indispensables sont écrites dans une langue romane, il me semblerait 
>> devoir être rejeté, oui.
>>
>> GA
>>
>> On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 7:52 AM Nigel Vincent 
>> <nigel.vincent at manchester.ac.uk 
>> <mailto:nigel.vincent at manchester.ac.uk>> wrote:
>>
>>     A related question to Ian's that I have sometimes thought about
>>     concerns the languages a researcher should be able to read in
>>     order to access relevant scholarship. Should, for example, a
>>     paper be rejected or revisions asked for if someone writing in
>>     English on a general linguistic topic has not cited relevant work
>>     written in a language other than English?
>>
>>     Nigel
>>
>>     Professor Nigel Vincent, FBA MAE
>>     Professor Emeritus of General & Romance Linguistics
>>     The University of Manchester
>>
>>     Linguistics & English Language
>>     School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
>>
>>     The University of Manchester
>>
>>     https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/researchers/nigel-vincent(f973a991-8ece-453e-abc5-3ca198c869dc).html
>>
>>     _______________________________________________
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>>
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>
> -- 
> Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de  <mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>)
> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
> Kahlaische Strasse 10	
> D-07745 Jena
> &
> Leipzig University
> Institut fuer Anglistik
> IPF 141199
> D-04081 Leipzig

-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de)
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10	
D-07745 Jena
&
Leipzig University
Institut fuer Anglistik
IPF 141199
D-04081 Leipzig

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