¹ Contemporary with Whitney's Language and the study of language (1867) and Life and growth of language (1874). Our undergraduate instructors advised us to read Richard Grant White; Whitney was not mentioned.

² An Associated Press dispatch (New York Times, November 26, 1939) is headed ‘Fishermen speak in Middle English’. Part of the wording is as follows: ‘A touch of Elizabethan England still flourishes on the “outer banks,” a serpentine strand off North Carolina's coast. . . . one hears on the “outer banks” words and phrases so similar to the language of Queen Elizabeth's day that philologists and historians see a distinct connection.‘

For this and most of the following citations, as well as for much kind help and criticism, I am indebted to Bernard Bloch.

³ So spelled in our reprint of the release.

⁴ The following, from a reader's letter to the New York Times, dated August 6, 1937, is quite characteristic.

‘Some years ago a scientist lived in a land of monkeys to learn their language. I suggest that the study of language begin there with the primitive sounds of animals, followed by a survey of what is known of the speech of savages. After this might come a review of the most ancient fragments of recorded tongues, tracing them down into the developed languages of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, China and elsewhere. Some idea of a dispersal of tongues from a common Asiatic center might thus be had and the earliest roots of our commonest words be learned. A brief survey, in translation, of the recorded literature of these dispersal tongues would bring us down through the ancient classics in all lands to the Greek and Roman cultures, where we should learn not merely a few pages of Xenophon and Homer; of Caesar, Cicero, Virgil and Horace, but, in translations, the whole glorious range of Greek and Latin literary, poetic, scientific and philosophic accomplishment, and the bearing of it all on our modern thought.‘

⁵ A letter to the New York Times, dated Caracas, Venezuela, November 18, 1939, contains the following characteristic passage: ‘But from what root did the word “Reich” grow up? Certainly not from the same as the world “realm.” I rather believe that “Reich” has something to do with the German word “reichen” (i.e., reach). On this basis I think I have a more satisfactory explanation of the designation of “Deutsches Reich” and “Frankreich,” as those countries or lands that “reach” (or embrace within their respective boundaries, present or former) the Germans, respectively the French (or Franks, originally). ... a long time ago, probably after the division of Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire, the western part (chiefly present-day France) came to be designated by the German word Frankreich (although probably spelled in the then prevailing German), i.e., the realm, or rather the land within which “reached” the Franks, from which word afterward a new word, France, resulted.‘

Cf. the discussion of a similar instance by R. G. Kent, JAOS 55.115–9 (1935).

⁶ Thus, a fairly elaborate theory is built up by Burton Rascoe, Titans of literature, from Homer to the present 48 ff. (New York, 1932).

⁷ Undefined popular terms, such as pleasure or anger, are here used because there is not (or I have not) enough physiology and sociology to redefine them. See, for the rest, A. P. Weiss, A theoretical basis of human behavior, revised edition 419 ff. (Columbus, 1929). Similarly, I use terms like mechanist or non-mentalist: in a community where nearly everyone believed that the moon is made of green cheese, students who constructed nautical almanacs without reference to cheese, would have to be designated by some special term, such as non-cheesists.

⁸ After I had outlined the relation of writing to speech, with explicit reference to the history of our science, before a group of educationists who were interested in elementary reading instruction, I was finally refuted by the statement that ‘you'll have to show the modern educationist’.

⁹ A physician, of good general background and education, who had been hunting in the north woods, told me that the Chippewa language contains only a few hundred words. Upon question, he said that he got this information from his guide, a Chippewa Indian. When I tried to state the diagnostic setting, the physician, our host, briefly and with signs of displeasure repeated his statement and then turned his back to me. A third person, observing this discourtesy, explained that I had some experience of the language in question. This information had no effect.

¹⁰ 'You surely don't expect me (You wouldn't want your children) to go around saying things like I seen it or I done it.' A college administrator expressed his wonder at the very ‘liberal’ attitude of linguists in matters of ‘grammar’.

¹¹ Having read a few sentences about the difference between language and writing, a philosopher concludes that the linguistic author refuses to talk about writing. This conclusion is not shaken by a following fairly wordy passage about the use of graphic signs. To say that writing is not the central and basic form of language is simply to ignore writing altogether. See Journal of Philosophy 36.613 (1939).

Naive invention of phonetic alphabets is not uncommon. The inventor usually believes that he has made an important discovery. Usually, also, he views this discovery as capable of immediately affecting language—removing language barriers or the like. Thus, Senator Robert L. Owen of Oklahoma invented a ‘global alphabet’ (78th Congress, 1st Session; Senate Document No. 49, Government Printing Office, 1943). The New York Times (July 29, 1943) quotes Senator Owen as follows: ‘Through it I can teach any reasonably intelligent man Chinese in two months,’ he asserted. 'It is a means by which we can teach the English language to all the world at high speed and negligible cost. It will pay its own way.'

¹² A Russian savant was shocked, in the classical manner described by Jespersen, Grundfragen der Phonetik 56 (Leipzig, 1904), at the sight of the transcriptions used in an elementary Russian course for American students, transcriptions which deviate from the conventional orthography, such as /trúpka/ for graphic trubka, /sát/ for graphic sad, /búdjit/ for graphic budet. In his complaint to an administrative officer he alluded at some length to ‘the written and spoken language ... of Turgeniev, Tolstoy and Chekhov’, and to the circumstance that one of his schoolmates later became well-known as a poet.

¹³ Henry Alford, The Queen's English (London, 1864 [1863]); George Washington Moon, A defence of the Queen's English (London, 1863); The Dean's English (London, 1864). These books went into several editions, taking the shape of a polemic; see the entries in A. G. Kennedy, A bibliography of writings on the English language (New York, 1927). Alford and Moon develop the art of finding ‘errors’ in English to a point where probably no utterance could escape censure. On Alford, see W. D. Whitney, Oriental and linguistic studies 2.166 (New York, 1874).

¹⁴ S.A. Nock of the Kansas State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, in the Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors 29.202 (1943).

¹⁵ A. P. Weiss ix.

¹⁶ Counter-statements are of no avail, e.g. Weiss vii:

‘When Watson maintains that he will not discuss consciousness, this is generally interpreted by psychologists to be an arbitrary elimination of the essential part of human behavior. To these it seems as if the behaviorists ignore consciousness because it is too difficult, or because it is a phase in the study of human behavior with which they do not wish to be bothered. Of course, no such inference is warranted. Behaviorism claims to render a more complete and a more scientific account of the totality of human achievement without the conception of consciousness, than traditional psychology is able to render with it. The factors which traditional psychology vaguely classifies as conscious or mental elements merely vanish without a remainder into the biological and social components of the behavioristic analysis.‘

¹⁷ The actual claim of the mechanist, regardless of its merits, that was to be met, is of course an entirely different one. Mechanists and mentalists will in principle give the same definitions for the meaning of a word; only, the latter, in principle if not in actual usage, prefix to each definition some such phrase as the image of, the concept of, the idea of; L. Bloomfield, Language 143 f. (New York, 1933); see also p. 38. My statement of the difference may be all wrong, but one cannot do away with it by inventing some entirely different and plainly absurd statement, attributing it to the mechanist, and then refuting it.

¹⁸ An extreme instance, worthy of quotation:

‘This paper proposes to discuss the phonemics of bilinguals from the standpoint of their conceptions as well as their speech, an aspect which will be considered unscientific by . . . confirmed behaviorists. . . . However, we offer as evidence only objectively observable behavior, what people say and what people do. Like all scientific evidence, introspective report requires critical handling. We do not offer as established fact every golden remark of the native informant, but check it against the phonetics of his utterance, his handling of an experimental alphabet, his facial and verbal reactions to our attempts to speak words of his language, his pronunciation of other languages we know, and any other item that may suggest something. This is Sapir's method, the critical use of every bit of evidence. It refuses to be restricted to using only half the observable facts, and is not frightened at such stigmas as “mentalist.” ‘—M. Swadesh in Language, culture, and personality: essays in memory of Edward Sapir 59 (Menasha, 1941). One wonders which half of the observable facts is not included in what people say and what people do, and is accessible to the mentalist but not to the mechanist.

¹⁹ That is, the mechanist is repeating the mistakes of philosophers who took no account of the effects of language. It is customary to condemn any aberrant doctrine by identifying it with any other, on the strength of any common feature whatever (compare, for instance, the political-sociological series slum clearance, socialized medicine, New Deal, communism, free love). Here again, counter-statement does not help, e.g. Weiss 303 f.

²⁰ L. Bloomfield, Linguistic aspects of science 13 f. (International Encyclopedia of Unified Science 1.4; Chicago, 1939).

²¹ Leo Spitzer, Why does language change? MLQ 4.430 fn. 23 (1943).

²² Misquotation; the expression is not n my dialect.

²³ Whether the publications of the Society are pervaded by such a bias may be determined by any reader. If articles of any one trend should appear to predominate, the reason would doubtless be the same as that stated by the Editor in Bulletin 15.18 (1942): ‘Language is not the organ of any one school of linguistic theory, but of the Linguistic Society as a whole. It may publish controversial views, and occasionally it may seem to give more space to one side of a controversy than to another, if supporters of that side happen to send in more material; but the Committee on Publications, in their official capacity, have no interest in promoting any special cause beyond the one for whose advancement our Society was organized.‘ It accords with this statement that five articles by Spitzer have appeared in the journal during the past four years (Lang. 16.213–4; 17.50–3, 253–5; 19.156–61, 258–61).

The passage cited by Spitzer as an instance of anti-mentalism is taken from a ten-year-old Language Dissertation. Without prejudice to the merits of that work, it is to be noted that the following statement appears on its inside back cover: ‘The Society does not pass upon the scholarly merit nor upon the validity of the theses propounded in the dissertations.‘ If examples of an anti-mentalistic bias occur on nearly every page of the Society's publications, an example should not have been so far to seek.