Re: Bushman clicks and tsks

Peter T. Daniels wrote:

There's a good reason John McWhorter didn't get tenure at Berkeley and
is now a "fellow" of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think
tank. He tends to make things up.


I haven't studied the subject enough to have an independent opinion on the origins of language, but I did want to address this point. Of course McWhorter makes things up. That's what theorists do. Darwin and Einstein also made things up. That doesn't make them right or wrong. That comes with the quality of the evidence. (And there are plenty of reasons why people are denied tenure.)


Did they warn you, 25 years ago, to avoid the books by Mario Pei?
McWhorter is our generation's Pei.


I can't recall any time in my undergraduate career that I was ever warned away from any book or any professional scholar's writings. That's in any department. Some professors weren't on the reading list or weren't in a bibliography, but if the students found them on their own in the library, we were expected to use the tools at our disposal to weigh the arguments as presented to us and come to our own conclusions.



Does he provide any evidence or argumentation for the "pre-vocal
cords" theory? Of course not. Unless you can find a footnote in one of
his books that mentions this, I'm afraid you're out of luck!


It's been a while since I listened to McWhorter's _History of Language_ tapes. He did provide some interesting ideas to back up his theory. He was careful to note that it was only a theory.


There has been quite a bit of work (speculation, of course) on the
origins of language over the past decade or so, and I'm not sure
anyone has brought together and comprehensibly set out the competing
theories, but you can find collections of papers at your local
research library. A good place to start might be Carstairs-McCarthy's
chapter in the Blackwell Handbook of Linguistics, but that's now
nearly ten years old.

And I see that David Crystal has yet another, probably excellent, book
on the nature of language, which probably touches on the topic.

Another fine writer to check out is Jean Aitchison. She has written on
this in the past and tends to issue new editions of her books in
preference to new titles.


It looks like I have some reading to do. Thanks for the direction for my reading.


--Lia

.

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