Re: Linguists who have gone a bit...eccentric?

From: benlizross (benlizro_at_ihug.co.nz)
Date: 08/30/04 

Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 09:10:35 +1200

Merlijn De Smit wrote:
>
> 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 Viritt$BgKg(Jduring the 50s
> contain a marvellous polemic between the Finnish linguist Erkki
> Itkonen and the Hungarian linguist Jeno Faz$BqL(Jas, 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

The name of Mary Ritchie Key has recently come up again here. Though
much less celebrated than Greenberg, she did have a job in linguistics
at UC Irvine, and from what I understand did perfectly sound work in the
language and gender area and also on some South American languages. (Her
niceness as a person is attested to by none other than Peter T.
Daniels.) However, she apparently came to feel that lots of long-range
genetic connections were out there waiting to be found. She projected a
global series of large-scale comparative vocabularies, from which such
relations could be discovered. This project AFAIK came to naught except
for Tryon's Comparative Austronesian Dictionary, which of course covered
a single family already well known. Key's own small volume on purported
connections between South American and Oceanic languages is unbelievably
bad, down there with the works of Barry Fell or the comparable volume by
the eccentric Wilhelm Schuhmacher. Unfortunately it's been discovered by
one of the resident kooks on sci.archaeology, who keeps bringing it up
as a pioneering piece of linguistic research.

Ross Clark

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