Comments on: Linguists as villains http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/linguists-as-villains/ A blog mostly about language Tue, 21 May 2013 18:02:36 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: the linguistic isolating of justice from money « power of language blog: partnering with reality by JR Fibonacci http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/linguists-as-villains/#comment-39266 Thu, 18 Oct 2012 04:36:48 +0000 http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/?p=9467#comment-39266 [...] Linguists as villains (arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com) [...]

]]> By: the ridger http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/linguists-as-villains/#comment-17905 Wed, 04 Apr 2012 12:08:20 +0000 http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/?p=9467#comment-17905 Indeed. On the walls here are big maps showing “Languages of Europe / Africa / South America / the MIddle East / etc”. Only in Europe do the languages fall neatly along national borders. As much the nation-state as anything else, but it’s quite striking.

]]> By: arnold zwicky http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/linguists-as-villains/#comment-17875 Tue, 03 Apr 2012 22:46:57 +0000 http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/?p=9467#comment-17875 Quite so. Early Romantic ideas led in many different directions, including serious folklore studies and dialectology (both taking the material of Das Volk seriously). But any set of ideas can be exploited for dark purposes.

I refrained from assuming animus on Schell’s part towards Waring (though it was tempting) and chose to criticize him on the basis of the facts about language standardization (in the 19th century) as I know them.

]]> By: Michael Newman http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/linguists-as-villains/#comment-17868 Tue, 03 Apr 2012 20:20:19 +0000 http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/?p=9467#comment-17868 If you want to accuse linguists of something terrible, a much more plausible accusation could be how the study of historical linguistics in the 19th century, in particular the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European fed into the various Aryan ancestry myths that led eventually to you-known-who (as well as more minor weirdnesses like Theosophy). Of course it’s a fallacy to blame linguists for Hitler and the nazis, but if you’re determined to say something nasty about an undergraduate who won a grant to do linguistic research, it’s not quite as off base as the one outlined above.

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