[B-Greek] Linguists in the tower of Babel

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Mon Jun 27 10:08:37 EDT 2005


I've received a couple off-list responses to my message of earlier  
this morning that have made me think I should clarify that statement.  
I certainly don't mean to disparage the field of Linguistics. I have  
myself learned a lot from those on the list and off who write from  
the vantage of professional
linguistics, and I readily  grant that some very useful things have  
come out of the linguists' workshop; I am grateful for what I have  
found especially helpful in my own efforts to understand the nature  
of language in general and of Greek in particular, but of other  
languages as well. I've always thought of linguistics as a sub-field  
of anthropology, which is surely a social science other than in its  
purely biological aspect. My chief complaints regard:
  (1) a tendency to express hypothetical judgments in pontifical  
terms which are hardly justified on the basis of any general  
consensus in the field; (2) what is all too often a seeming  
reluctance to attempt to communicate theories and findings in terms  
that are readily intelligible to genuinely interested lay students of  
language. These are tendencies I've observed in some of the  
discussion; I don't mean at all to make a blanket judgment on the  
discipline and all its practitioners.

On Jun 27, 2005, at 5:41 AM, Carl Conrad wrote:
> Just about a month ago I had occasion (May 28, "Re: [B-Greek]
> Genitive vs Adjective") to note on this list my observation that
> professional linguists seem to me to work in and write from a sort
> of Tower of Babel, speaking and writing languages or dialects that
> differ from each other on so many basic assumptions and definitions
> and frameworks that non-professional language-students cannot be
> confident of understanding what they say or mean; indeed,
> Elizabeth's observation makes one wonder whether they understand
> each other. We've seen how difficult it is to talk about or
> understand Greek tense and verbal aspect, not just because the
> matters under discussion are difficult but because there is no
> consensus on preferable terminology or basic assumptions. I've
> found the same to be the case in some of the work by professional
> linguists on voice and this has been something of a hindrance to me
> in formulating an intelligible account of what I've discovered
> about the way voice in ancient Greek verbs really works. I suspect
> that what I have observed about professional linguists is more
> generally true of the social sciences: their claim to be "sciences"
> at all rests upon defining "science" in a way that means something
> altogether than what it means in the natural sciencs. Perhaps
> that's because the social sciences are dealing with human
> phenomena, which somehow do not yield data that are so readily
> quantifiable and subject to verifiable. Whatever the truth of this
> may be, it is particularly disturbing to read again and again
> propositions about how Greek worked at some particular point in its
> history that are put forth as if they were more than hypothetical.
>
> Sorry about that, but it's a long-time peeve of mine that
> occasionally has to find expression.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at ioa.com or cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/




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