Re: Bushman clicks and tsks

On Dec 11, 4:26 pm, Julia Altshuler <jaltshu...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.

If he actually had a theory, wouldn't he have published in a
professional, peer-reviewed forum?

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.)

Even people who are African American and well known to the gen.pub.
and do well on TV? He must have shown great promise out of the gate if
his first job was at Berkeley. (Every publicity publication from the
University of Chicago for decades prominently featured Erica Reiner
and John Hope Franklin, who were among the very few senior faculty
members who were female and black respectively. I didn't know him, but
I did see her once become heatedly offended when someone was foolish
enough to suggest in her presence that her in-house recognition was
not entirely due to her nearly unmatched accomplishments in
Assyriology.)

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.

Please hang around here, too -- we can use some sanity at the moment.

--Lia

An unusual clipping! -or is it not short for Julia?
.

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