[Lingtyp] languages of scholarship

Fri Jun 26 11:29:13 UTC 2020

Can we please be careful with making statements like "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.)".

Africa is a large and diverse continent and there are many colleagues there
who are familiar with relevant literature in English, French, Arabic,
Portuguese since these are the languages of higher education and research
in their countries.

Peter

On Fri, 26 Jun 2020 at 10:43, Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>
wrote:

> 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>
> <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> <wiemerb at uni-mainz.de>;
> Gilles Authier <gilles.authier at gmail.com> <gilles.authier at gmail.com>
> *Cc:* 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>
> *Sent:* Friday, June 26, 2020 9:44 AM
> *To:* Gilles Authier <gilles.authier at gmail.com>; Nigel Vincent <
> nigel.vincent at manchester.ac.uk>
> *Cc:* lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <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
> <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>
> *Cc:* 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> 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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>
> --
> 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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>

-- 
Prof Peter K. Austin
Emeritus Professor in Field Linguistics, SOAS
Visiting Researcher, Oxford University
Foundation Editor, EL Publishing
Honorary Treasurer, Philological Society

Department of Linguistics, SOAS
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square
London WC1H 0XG
United Kingdom
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