Re: Linguists who have gone a bit...eccentric?
From: Merlijn De Smit (isolintu_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 08/30/04
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Date: 30 Aug 2004 05:30:30 -0700
tyusha@freemail.ru (Xenia) wrote in message news:<7df91bca.0408291206.6735618@posting.google.com>...
> I recall that Marr's theories were discussed in this NG in 1990 when
> nobody of the present posters was there yet. Must check the google
> archives.
>
> Cheers!
Marr would be a good example for the thing that Rolleston would be
looking for, since he was otherwise a respectable linguist. It's just
that his theory of language evolution (parts of which - not the
proto-language proto-words - but the rejection of the tree model for
some vague notion of contact and convergence - live on tenaciously
today).
As Peter Daniels indicated, Marrism was something of an official
ideology in the SU until the Great Linguist himself intervened in the
matter, so a lot of otherwise perfectly competent Russian and later
East European linguists subscribed to his ideas. If there are any
Finnish readers out here, the first issues of Virittäjä during the 50s
contain a marvellous polemic between the Finnish linguist Erkki
Itkonen and the Hungarian linguist Jeno Fazékas, perfectly good
linguist except that he continued Marr's work to the extent that be
believed to have found the first human proto-articulation which is
apparently something like "ngeng!". Erkki Itkonen's lively sketch of
cavemen sitting around a campfire shouting "ngeng!" at each other is
classic.
As for other "eccentric" linguists, perhaps Greenberg's and Ruhlen's
work on proto-world might qualify - and particularly Joseph
Greenberg's case is interesting since his work on language typology
was basically foundational. But his later forays in language
classification were dreadful.
My impression is that things usually go wrong whenever a linguist, or
any academic, believes that his credentials in, say, a subfield of
linguistics (and there are very few truly general linguists who can
write competently on many or all subfields) makes him competent to
write about others, or in case of historical linguistics, about
archaeology and population genetics or vice versa. Add to this an
unhealthy dose of Kuhn-reading (Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific
revolutions" is a fine book but the downside is that every would-be
Galileo knows it by heart) and eagerness to shift paradigms, and you
usually have a very big mess on your hands.
Merlijn de Smit
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