Superb response to crackpottery

Roland G. Kent, who more than 15 years later would publish the
definitive edition and grammar of Old Persian texts, was President of
the American Oriental Society in 1935, and in his Presidential Address
(published already in vol. 55 [1935]: 115-37 -- or maybe the journal
was a year behind, as it has been for my 25+ years as a member of the
Society), he addresses the problem of non-linguists attempting to
engage in linguistics.

I looked for it because it is referred to elsewhere as a review of De
Lacey O':Leary's *Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages*, a
beautifully printed but intellectually bankrupt volume from 1923. (I
was shocked to discover, through JSTOR's search function, that it was
cited for information about Arabic in an article in *Language* in
1983.)

Most of Kent's article is devoted to excoriating O'Leary, and the
authors of two commentaries on books of the Bible, for laxity in
application of linguistic method. (At times he can be a bit churlish,
as when he objects to the name "Abyssinian" for what is usually called
"Ethiopic," or when he appears not to realize that the term "letter"
was used for 'sound' through most of the 19th century, as has been
documented by the phonetician and historian of phonetics and phonetic
transcription the late David Abercrombie.) But he begins, as the more
successful AOS Presidential Addresses typically do, with a foray into
the quaint -- in this case, an exchange of correspondence in the
Letters column of *The Academy* from the first decade of the twentieth
century.

An amateur of the sort we often see at sci.lang wrote to point out what
he felt were errors and omissions in an article the magazine had
published, on some Indo-European etymologies, and proposing some of his
own. In a subsequent issue, one correspondent excoriated the Editor for
publishing such nonsense and insisted it was not worth bothering with;
and Professor Skeat, to whom the O.P. [as we call them these days] had
appealed for judgement, went into considerable detail about why the
proposals were unacceptable. The Editor noted that it was not his
responsibility to be familiar with abstruse details of IE philology,
feeling that his pages served simply as a conduit for communication on
all sorts of interesting topics.

Kent criticizes the editor for abdicating his responsibility; O.P. for
sticking his nose in an area where he had no business opining; and
Skeat for taking O.P.'s writing seriously. He praises only the
objector, for calling a spade a spade, or folly folly.

I commend Kent's Presidential Address to everyone who seriously reads
this forum.

.

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