¹ Language Monograph No. 24, Structural sketches 1 (1948). There is no gainsaying the obvious merit of this work within its self-appointed bounds. If I have singled it out for criticism in the discussion below, this is only because Hall's monograph is the only halfway complete analysis of a culture language that comes to hand—certainly not on the principle ‘sit experimentum in corpore vili’.

² Lg. 24.186 (1948), in a review of Linguistic structures of native America, by Harry Hoijer and others.

³ Ibid. 184–5.

⁴ Bernard Bloch and George L. Trager, Outline of linguistic anatysis §1.4 (Baltimore, 1942).

⁵ Spitzer: Bonn etc., 1922; Bally: 2d ed., Berne, 1944.

⁶ Lg. 24.182–3 (1948), in a review of ¿Qué es la lingüística?, by A. Benvenuto Terracini.

⁷ The identification of morphemes, Lg. 24.414 (1948)—in my opinion one of the few rays of light amid the structuralist obscurity.

⁸ Although questions of juncture and stress admittedly complicate the analysis and introduce new problems of arrangement. Cf. William G. Moulton, Juncture in modern standard German Lg. 23.212–26 (1947), in which aspiration and the glottal stop are discussed from a purely tactical standpoint.

⁹ The Spanish language 1 (London, 1936). The well-known series to which this volume belongs is significantly called The Great Languages.

¹⁰ Note that I am not using the term culture in the anthropologist's sense. The kind of culture that he talks about is transmitted and subsumed by every language. I use the term in a non-technical sense, to mean those characteristics (especially as they are embodied in a written literature) which distinguish a high civilization from a low one.

¹¹ Outline of linguistic anatysis §2.1.

¹² AJP 71.98–9 (1950). In general, Spitzer, with his luminous and sensitive feeling for language as an organic whole, offers an approach to language which is much more effective because correspondingly subtler than that of the linguistic materialists.

¹³ In Hall's monograph on French, the only real justification for including in a study of the spoken language an account of past definite and imperfect subjunctive (or, in his terminology, Past C and Timeless C—a rose by any other name) should be that the printed word, even through the daily newspaper, obtrudes these forms incessantly on the average speaker's consciousness. Their inclusion ‘for the sake of completeness’ or to supplement the analysis as such is not to be tolerated.

¹⁴ Modern English usage s.v. bereaved (London, 1926). If Fowler had used the method favored by Bloch (Lg. 23.406) in dealing with the similar problem of showed vs. shown, he would have set up the fiction of two different but nearly homonymous morphemes, /bӘref/ and /bӘriyv/, and asserted baldly that the distinction between bereft and bereaved lies in a difference of meaning between these two stems. The comparison is instructive. Fowler can cope with a truly complicated situation in a culture language intimately familiar to him. Bloch, though equally familiar with the same culture language, chooses to treat it inadequately from the outside, and comes up with a jejune stratagem. (Cf. Nida's previously cited criticism of Bloch and Hockett for their inclination to treat overt distinctions as meaningless and covert distinctions as meaningful, Lg. 24.415 ff.)

¹⁵ Bloch and Trager, op.cit. §5.7(3).

¹⁶ Again and again writers of descriptive studies, especially when they address themselves to a beginner, emphasize the reputed perils attendant upon the use of an informant who is ‘too well educated’. Several of the excellent linguistic manuals issued by the U. S. Armed Forces Institute (inspired and influenced by structuralist methodology) contain in their introductions a fatuous admonition that the native speaker who is to serve as informant should not be ‘over-educated‘—whatever that means.

¹⁷ On the present state of Indo-European linguistics, Lg. 25.333 (1949).

¹⁸ I would include under this head a portentous statement in Hockett's review already once selected for invidious comment (Lg. 24.185), that ‘as descriptive linguistics approaches maturity, structural descriptions will in time assume such a succinct and exact form that no one would think of reading one any more than a mathematician would read a table of logarithms.‘ One is reminded of a comparable suggestion ironically put forward by a character in Aldous Huxley's novel Point counter point, to write a novel exclusively in algebraic symbols or variations in blood pressure.

¹⁹ Although self-evident, this generalization naturally cannot be demonstrated here. H. L. Mencken has rightly called attention, for instance, to the ambivalence of our honorific title ‘Professor’, which is frequently used in the United States in contexts unflattering to academic prestige and unthinkable to a European. The same European might wonder why Mencken is so bitter in his condemnation of the American ‘school-marm’ because she attempts to teach her charges English as she thinks it ought to be spoken—a process which in France or Italy is not considered unreasonable.

²⁰ The field of linguistics 6 (SIL Occasional Papers 1, 1949).

²¹ In this category may be grouped all attempts to treat Latin (a literary language practiced by an élite) exclusively in the alien terms used for the structural analysis of a non-culture language. See recently Henry M. Hoenigswald in Lg. 25.392–4 (1949) and Hall in CP 41.84–90 (1946).

²² Language 217 (New York, 1933).

²³ JAOS 63.34–65 (1943). I am indebted to Prof. Herbert W. Duda of the University of Vienna for his elucidation of the Turkish examples used in the text.

²⁴ Einführung in die Problematik und Methodik der Sprachwissenschaft 11 (Halle/Saale, 1943).

²⁵ An unbiased reader who peruses the interminable finespun disquisitions on abstract method so common in structuralist literature (for instance those by Rulon S. Wells) must wonder what possible relation this theory bears to his own quite concrete studies. Like the spectator at the ancient Greek play, he will ask himself with dismay, ‘What has this to do with Dionysus?‘