Language as a Human Problem

This interdisciplinary compilation is intended to introduce the current state of linguistic scholarship, including the history of language study.
Co-editor Einar Haugen takes the intriguing tale of language diversification known as "the Tower of Babel" as the text of his essay. He notes, "those of us who love languages...and find in language a source of novel delights and subtle experience, find it hard to put ourselves in the right frame of mind to understand the conception of language diversity as a curse." [33] The richness of language is not a curse, and those who share a common language are just as crippled by pride and other frailties as those who enjoy "the confusion" of tongues. The diversification is ruled and regular, for each show more child learns it anew -- never exactly as taught. Idiosyncracies, which survive the initial taunts of peers, if shared, become idiolects, and as they accumulate in isolation, into dialects, and finally, into language families and separate tongues.
Unfortunately, like so many works of "scholarship" teased out of contemporary campa, most of the writing is not useful, scientific, or exquisite. As if "language problems" can be resolved by contrasting everyone's "theory" about the arbitrary structures. It is filled with statements of the obvious: "Language is a vehicle for communication" and "Language poses multiple problems for education..." [137] It is also filled with well-referenced but useless apparent pretensions to "science": "We may guess either that the language--the collectivity of its speakers, that is--in some sense 'flees' what it perceives consciously as old, old-fashioned, or archaic; or else that the language moves by extrapolation in the direction indicated by what it preserves." [96] Please. And why does anyone need to know that "a theory does not exist" for What linguistic sames are relevant in poetry? Oh please. Spare the sames and spoil the child. Metonymy, although mysterious, is not a grail someone will "discover", Poetry is not a disease, and Language is not a "human problem " that needs academic ventilation of theoretical "solutions" . Language needs MORE than this, and we need butt-kicking linguists, not whiners trying to impress us with "research" limited to what other theorists have said. Surely we have learned from Zipf, Korzybski, Chomski, etc. and understand that men more intelligent than us have already done the theorizing and we are still about to prematurely destroy the Garden. Not one of the papers makes our world a safer place. We are surrounded by academics who are part of "the problem" they themselves so finely articulate. We may be doomed for lack of communication, but we also seem to be doomed because of it.
Is it too much to ask for clinical research, conclusions drawn from data, useful comparisons of language teaching techniques, tools for translation, etc.? show less