What Bloomfield said. but did adopt

[Anthony Grant]

It adds an extra poignancy when one realises that the Bloomfields didn't have children two boys, one of whom asked them to adopt the other one, for whose loneliness in the orphanage he had felt sympathy.  Alice Sayers Bloomfield was none too robust.   And even though Bloomfield's concept of 'Central Algonquian' is awry, he did splendid work on an Ojibwa idiolect, Menominee, tons of Plains Cree and  (second-hand) Mesquakie, and wrote arguably the best grammar of an Austronesian language.  Go Len!

Anthony

>>> "Rankin, Robert L." <rankin at KU.EDU> 05/13/13 9:08 PM >>>
Thanks for looking that up, Dave!  I'd have had to hobble to the University library as Algonquian materials are not part of my personal library.  I used to quote that passage to my Field Methods classes, and it always got a good laugh when I got to the celibacy part.

Bob
________________________________
From: Siouan Linguistics [SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu] on behalf of David Costa [pankihtamwa at EARTHLINK.NET]
Sent: Monday, May 13, 2013 2:46 PM
To: SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu
Subject: Re: What Bloomfield said.

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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