On 6/05/2022 12:33 p.m., Quinn C wrote:
> * Ross Clark:
>
>> On 5/05/2022 2:43 p.m., Ross Clark wrote:
>>>
>>> 2000-2010 examples from COHA (US) corpus:
>>> ==============================================
>>> He [Ulysses S.Grant] was an accomplished linguist, his reading
>>> encompassed a broader range than that of most officers...
>>>
>>> One key figure was an archdeacon of the cathedral named Domingo
>>> Gundisalvo, a talented linguist with philosophical interests of his own.
>>>
>>> DIED. CHARLES BERLITZ, 90, linguist and author who explored the
>>> paranormal; in Tamarac, Fla. A grandson of the founder of the
>>> Berlitz language schools and a onetime head of the company's
>>> publications, he reportedly spoke more than 30 languages.
>>>
>>> Instead I talked about [Richard] Burton, master linguist,
>>> soldier, towering figure of nineteenth-century letters and adventure.
>>>
>>> Aided by native converts whose tongues the natural linguist swiftly
>>> made his own, he baked bricks and limed them with red mud trodden
>>> by his own feet....
>>> ==============================
>>> And from online texts clearly written within the last decade or two, the
>>> expression "quite a linguist":
>>> ===============================
>>> However, he was apparently quite a linguist, since he wrote tunes for
>>> some English songs. [Wikipedia on Arturo Buzzi-Peccia, 1854-1943]
>>>
>>> He was also quite a linguist, acquiring a knowledge of 12 languages.
>>> [Robert Stein...]
>>>
>>> His intelligence is 'quite above average' than other Vartans, and
>>> in his spare time, and positions aboard airships travelling to other
>>> lands around Sinai, he has become quite a linguist.... [description
>>> of a game character]
>>>
>>> Mark McDonnel (Th.M., 1996), a Texas native, is quite a linguist. While
>>> speaking Russian, he teaches students at Kiev Theological Seminary to
>>> read Greek … no small challenge.
>>>
>>> She is quite a linguist with several languages under her belt.
>>>
>>> He attended the world famous Lausanne Hotel School and like so many
>>> Swiss, he is quite a linguist with the following languages in his
>>> repertoire: Swiss/German, English, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
>>> ==================================================
>>>
>>> At the same time, though I don't have a bundle of quotes, it was clear
>>> that the linguistics sense of "linguist" was becoming more widely
>>> understood and used.
>>
>> Apologies for careless copy/pasting. I meant to post only the last part
>> of that, relating to "linguist"="polyglot". It was, however, embedded in
>> a larger discussion of "linguistician", which I'd rather not revisit.
>
> [Cut that down for you]
>
> There's a story going round right now about a carpet cleaner who speaks
> 24 or more languages, and I haven't seen him called a linguist. It may
> have a lot to do with who spread the story first or widely, in this case
> the Washington Post, it seems.

Yes, I think the "educated" factor does come into it. One might even
suggest that the people who are now favouring "polyglot" over "linguist"
are those who are aware of the linguistics usage.

>
> | He is what linguists call a hyperpolyglot — defined as a person who
> | can speak at least 11 languages.
>
> <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/steve-hartman-vaughn-smith-carpet-cleaner-languages/>

Huh. It's an un-surprising coinage, but I wonder what official linguists
defined it so precisely?

Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz> writes:
>On 6/05/2022 12:33 p.m., Quinn C wrote:
....
>>|He is what linguists call a hyperpolyglot — defined as a person who
>>|can speak at least 11 languages.
>><https://www.cbsnews.com/news/steve-hartman-vaughn-smith-carpet-cleaner-languages/>
>Huh. It's an un-surprising coinage, but I wonder what official linguists
>defined it so precisely?

People have a word for someone who can speak eleven languages -
"hyperpolyglot". They do not talk about how they define
"speak a language" and how they verify the claim in the
case of a specific polyglot! So, this might be where what
seems to be so "precise" becomes quite vague!

People do not have a word for someone who learned a single
foreign language to perfection - because this is more difficult
to measure and to grasp - quality instead of quantity. It
does not sound as impressive although it might actually be
as difficult or more difficult than to "speak" eleven languages.

Peter T. Daniels submitted this idea :
> On Wednesday, May 4, 2022 at 6:12:31 PM UTC-4, snide...@gmail.com wrote:
>> Stefan Ram submitted this gripping article, maybe on Wednesday:

>>> (All transcriptions done by me.)
>>>
>> That's nice, but what's the source? Can we compare the transcriptions
>> to the talk?
>
> lmgtfy:

Neither of us should have to gtfa, since Stefan already had the URL.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ0-dfGRf_k
>
> It's an hour-long talk.
>
> I've never met Monica Macaulay, but I know she is well regarded.

Now that Crew 3 has landed, I can look to queue this one.

/dps

--
Trust, but verify.

On Thursday, May 5, 2022 at 6:05:00 PM UTC-4, Quinn C wrote:
> * Peter T. Daniels:
> > On Wednesday, May 4, 2022 at 6:12:31 PM UTC-4, snide...@gmail.com wrote:
> >> Stefan Ram submitted this gripping article, maybe on Wednesday:
> >>> r...@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) writes:
> >
> >>>> Many linguist have made this experience, when they reveal
> >>>> that they are linguists, they are immediately asked,
> >>>> "And how many languages do you speak?".
> >>> I am sorry for not having given a source, but now I can give
> >>> you one source for this! Monica (Macaulay?) gives a talk
> >>> that one can hear in the video "What is Linguistics and What
> >>> Can it do for Us?". And there she says around minute 9 - 10:
> >>>> First of all, not all linguists speak lots of languages,
> >>>> and every single linguist in this room has had the
> >>>> experience of: you say you're a linguist, and people
> >>>> respond and say, "Oh! How many languages do you speak?".
> >
> > That's true.
> >
> >>> . I viewed this video once, and then that report must have
> >>> become part of my background knowledge, but I have forgotten
> >>> the exact source. Now, that I'm coincidentally watching this
> >>> video again, I have found a source for my claim!
> >>>> Best answer: "I speak one language, my native language.
> >>>> And also I study ...".
> >
> > That's how I answer it.
> But doesn't, to my mind, imply that the asker thought that was the only
> meaning of "linguist". I think many people assume that studying
> languages on an academic level involves learning many languages.

It involves learning _about_ many languages.

A Cornell undergraduate had to have a "funny language" for a B.A.
in linguistics -- Hindi counted, but Sanskrit didn't; Modern Hebrew
(mine) did, but Biblical Hebrew didn't.

I don't remember what Chicago required for the Ph.D. (beyond the
general Humanities Division requirement of two additional languages
of scholarship), but I had classes in a bunch of classical Semitic languages.

> In fact, many linguists do learn several, and it is usual and advisable
> to learn at least one language not closely related to your native one.
> It's just not as central to being a linguist as people assume.

At Penn, Chomsky did Classical Arabic with the two greatest Arabists
of the 20th century (both refugees), Giorgio Levi Della Vida, who returned
to Italy after the war, and Franz Rosenthal, who found a home at Yale.
His Modern Hebrew related to summer camp at a kibbutz.

Except for a handful of examples in Spanish for a talk given in Central
America, after his M.A. he never said anything about any language but
English. One of his best-known students, George Lakoff, boasted of
never having learned any foreign language.

The growing difficulties with his approach to language became
apparent as MIT attracted graduate students from abroad, who
attempted to apply it to their own languages -- the first ones were
Japanese, Italian, and Hungarian (two of them quite different from
English). The terminology remained resolutely Anglocentric, as
when the had to invent the term "pro-drop languages" for Italian,
which doesn't require a subject pronoun with a verb (since the verb
inflection identifies the person of the subject). English is fairly
unusual in this respect, so the special term should refer to "pronoun-
requiring" rather than pronoun-"dropping."

> Also, the more traditional majors associated with languages (like
> "Slavic languages") did involve learning multiple languages.

Language departments are often named "Language and Linguistics"
these days.

On Thursday, May 5, 2022 at 9:40:38 PM UTC-4, benl...@ihug.co.nz wrote:
> On 6/05/2022 12:33 p.m., Quinn C wrote:

> > There's a story going round right now about a carpet cleaner who speaks
> > 24 or more languages, and I haven't seen him called a linguist. It may
> > have a lot to do with who spread the story first or widely, in this case
> > the Washington Post, it seems.
>
> Yes, I think the "educated" factor does come into it. One might even
> suggest that the people who are now favouring "polyglot" over "linguist"
> are those who are aware of the linguistics usage.
>
> > | He is what linguists call a hyperpolyglot — defined as a person who
> > | can speak at least 11 languages.
> > <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/steve-hartman-vaughn-smith-carpet-cleaner-languages/>
>
> Huh. It's an un-surprising coinage, but I wonder what official linguists
> defined it so precisely?

I watched the CBS Evening News story because they had been hyping
it for two days -- one day longer than usual -- and it turned out to be
rather underwhelming. They scrolled the list of 41 languages he claims
(I counted as they went by), but he admitted that any number of them
were simply ones that he'd studied grammars of.

No source for the nonce word "hyperpolyglot" was offered.

I'm sure Eric Hamp had him beat, and maybe Robert A. Hall Jr.

I recently had occasion to look at Emerson's Collected Poems and
Translations. Apparently he was at home in Classical Persian. (Who
knew?) Incidentally, it was Longfellow who introduced the study of
modern languages to academia, or to Harvard. (His was Italian, and
his translation of Dante is still in print.)

On Friday, May 6, 2022 at 2:31:55 AM UTC-4, snide...@gmail.com wrote:
> Peter T. Daniels submitted this idea :
> > On Wednesday, May 4, 2022 at 6:12:31 PM UTC-4, snide...@gmail.com wrote:

> >> Stefan Ram submitted this gripping article, maybe on Wednesday:
> >>> (All transcriptions done by me.)
> >> That's nice, but what's the source? Can we compare the transcriptions
> >> to the talk?
> > lmgtfy:
>
> Neither of us should have to gtfa, since Stefan already had the URL.

I do not see Stefan's messages.("X-no-archive" or something; the
Stasi is still watching him.)

> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ0-dfGRf_k
> > It's an hour-long talk.
> > I've never met Monica Macaulay, but I know she is well regarded.
>
> Now that Crew 3 has landed, I can look to queue this one.

* Peter T. Daniels:

> On Thursday, May 5, 2022 at 9:40:38 PM UTC-4, benl...@ihug.co.nz wrote:
>> On 6/05/2022 12:33 p.m., Quinn C wrote:
>
>>> There's a story going round right now about a carpet cleaner who speaks
>>> 24 or more languages, and I haven't seen him called a linguist. It may
>>> have a lot to do with who spread the story first or widely, in this case
>>> the Washington Post, it seems.
>>
>> Yes, I think the "educated" factor does come into it. One might even
>> suggest that the people who are now favouring "polyglot" over "linguist"
>> are those who are aware of the linguistics usage.
>>
>>> | He is what linguists call a hyperpolyglot — defined as a person who
>>> | can speak at least 11 languages.
>>> <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/steve-hartman-vaughn-smith-carpet-cleaner-languages/>
>>
>> Huh. It's an un-surprising coinage, but I wonder what official linguists
>> defined it so precisely?
>
> I watched the CBS Evening News story because they had been hyping
> it for two days -- one day longer than usual -- and it turned out to be
> rather underwhelming. They scrolled the list of 41 languages he claims
> (I counted as they went by), but he admitted that any number of them
> were simply ones that he'd studied grammars of.
>
> No source for the nonce word "hyperpolyglot" was offered.

I suspect it doesn't come from linguists, but from the scene of
"polyglots" that organizes "polyglot conferences" and the like

I've met people who were involved with this one:
<https://montreal2019.langfest.org/en/>

It's essentially more a hobbyist community than in any way academic,
although it has academic people in it who make connections to linguists
and other disciplines.

--
Quinn C
My pronouns are they/them
(or other gender-neutral ones)

* Peter T. Daniels:

> On Thursday, May 5, 2022 at 6:05:00 PM UTC-4, Quinn C wrote:
>> * Peter T. Daniels:
>>> On Wednesday, May 4, 2022 at 6:12:31 PM UTC-4, snide...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>> Stefan Ram submitted this gripping article, maybe on Wednesday:
>>>>> r...@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) writes:
>>>
>>>>>> First of all, not all linguists speak lots of languages,
>>>>>> and every single linguist in this room has had the
>>>>>> experience of: you say you're a linguist, and people
>>>>>> respond and say, "Oh! How many languages do you speak?".
>>>
>>> That's true.
>>>
>>>>> [...]
>>>>>> Best answer: "I speak one language, my native language.
>>>>>> And also I study ...".
>>>
>>> That's how I answer it.
>> But doesn't, to my mind, imply that the asker thought that was the only
>> meaning of "linguist". I think many people assume that studying
>> languages on an academic level involves learning many languages.
>
> It involves learning _about_ many languages.

Yes, but laypeople don't know that and/or don't understand the
distinction.

>> In fact, many linguists do learn several, and it is usual and advisable
>> to learn at least one language not closely related to your native one.
>> It's just not as central to being a linguist as people assume.
>
> At Penn, Chomsky did Classical Arabic with the two greatest Arabists
> of the 20th century (both refugees), Giorgio Levi Della Vida, who returned
> to Italy after the war, and Franz Rosenthal, who found a home at Yale.
> His Modern Hebrew related to summer camp at a kibbutz.
>
> Except for a handful of examples in Spanish for a talk given in Central
> America, after his M.A. he never said anything about any language but
> English. One of his best-known students, George Lakoff, boasted of
> never having learned any foreign language.
>
> The growing difficulties with his approach to language became
> apparent as MIT attracted graduate students from abroad, who
> attempted to apply it to their own languages -- the first ones were
> Japanese, Italian, and Hungarian (two of them quite different from
> English). The terminology remained resolutely Anglocentric, as
> when the had to invent the term "pro-drop languages" for Italian,
> which doesn't require a subject pronoun with a verb (since the verb
> inflection identifies the person of the subject). English is fairly
> unusual in this respect, so the special term should refer to "pronoun-
> requiring" rather than pronoun-"dropping."

Right. Japanese prefers to leave out pronouns if they can be inferred
from context, which is a vague and subjective notion, not something that
can be formalized. That would be a further challenge to the above
dichotomy.

>> Also, the more traditional majors associated with languages (like
>> "Slavic languages") did involve learning multiple languages.
>
> Language departments are often named "Language and Linguistics"
> these days.

Those departments in German universities usually also covered literature
and culture. The one professor of Japanese at my university was
specialized in Nô theater, thus very good in Classical Japanese, and the
one professor of Chinese was also a medical doctor and his specialty was
history of Chinese Medicine or something like that.

--
Quinn C
My pronouns are they/them
(or other gender-neutral ones)

On 2022-05-06, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> On Thursday, May 5, 2022 at 6:05:00 PM UTC-4, Quinn C wrote:
>> * Peter T. Daniels:
>> > On Wednesday, May 4, 2022 at 6:12:31 PM UTC-4, snide...@gmail.com wrote:
>> >> Stefan Ram submitted this gripping article, maybe on Wednesday:
>> >>> r...@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) writes:
>> >
>> >>>> Many linguist have made this experience, when they reveal
>> >>>> that they are linguists, they are immediately asked,
>> >>>> "And how many languages do you speak?".
>> >>> I am sorry for not having given a source, but now I can give
>> >>> you one source for this! Monica (Macaulay?) gives a talk
>> >>> that one can hear in the video "What is Linguistics and What
>> >>> Can it do for Us?". And there she says around minute 9 - 10:
>> >>>> First of all, not all linguists speak lots of languages,
>> >>>> and every single linguist in this room has had the
>> >>>> experience of: you say you're a linguist, and people
>> >>>> respond and say, "Oh! How many languages do you speak?".
>> >
>> > That's true.
>> >
>> >>> . I viewed this video once, and then that report must have
>> >>> become part of my background knowledge, but I have forgotten
>> >>> the exact source. Now, that I'm coincidentally watching this
>> >>> video again, I have found a source for my claim!
>> >>>> Best answer: "I speak one language, my native language.
>> >>>> And also I study ...".
>> >
>> > That's how I answer it.
>> But doesn't, to my mind, imply that the asker thought that was the only
>> meaning of "linguist". I think many people assume that studying
>> languages on an academic level involves learning many languages.
>
> It involves learning _about_ many languages.
>
> A Cornell undergraduate had to have a "funny language" for a B.A.
> in linguistics -- Hindi counted, but Sanskrit didn't; Modern Hebrew
> (mine) did, but Biblical Hebrew didn't.

So it had to be a funny *living* language?

> I don't remember what Chicago required for the Ph.D. (beyond the
> general Humanities Division requirement of two additional languages
> of scholarship), but I had classes in a bunch of classical Semitic languages.
>
>> In fact, many linguists do learn several, and it is usual and advisable
>> to learn at least one language not closely related to your native one.
>> It's just not as central to being a linguist as people assume.
>
> At Penn, Chomsky did Classical Arabic with the two greatest Arabists
> of the 20th century (both refugees), Giorgio Levi Della Vida, who returned
> to Italy after the war, and Franz Rosenthal, who found a home at Yale.
> His Modern Hebrew related to summer camp at a kibbutz.
>
> Except for a handful of examples in Spanish for a talk given in Central
> America, after his M.A. he never said anything about any language but
> English. One of his best-known students, George Lakoff, boasted of
> never having learned any foreign language.
>
> The growing difficulties with his approach to language became
> apparent as MIT attracted graduate students from abroad, who
> attempted to apply it to their own languages -- the first ones were
> Japanese, Italian, and Hungarian (two of them quite different from
> English). The terminology remained resolutely Anglocentric, as
> when the had to invent the term "pro-drop languages" for Italian,
> which doesn't require a subject pronoun with a verb (since the verb
> inflection identifies the person of the subject). English is fairly
> unusual in this respect, so the special term should refer to "pronoun-
> requiring" rather than pronoun-"dropping."
>
>> Also, the more traditional majors associated with languages (like
>> "Slavic languages") did involve learning multiple languages.
>
> Language departments are often named "Language and Linguistics"
> these days.

--
If you wear a warmer sporran
you can keep the foe at bay

On Thu, 5 May 2022 20:33:29 -0400, Quinn C
<lispamateur@crommatograph.info> wrote:

>There's a story going round right now about a carpet cleaner who speaks
>24 or more languages, and I haven't seen him called a linguist.

Probably because he doesn't clean the carpets with his tongue.

ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) writes:
>People do not have a word for someone who learned a single
>foreign language to perfection - because this is more difficult
>to measure and to grasp - quality instead of quantity. It
>does not sound as impressive although it might actually be
>as difficult or more difficult than to "speak" eleven languages.

For one example: Fouché devotes 50 pages to the e muet
(Pierre Fouché, Traité de prononciation française, 2nd edn.,
Paris, 1969) and said in his lectures at the Sorbonne that
no foreigner could ever completely master the complexity of
this subject.

Now image than in spite of Fouché prognosis some foreigner
had completely mastered the complexity of this subject.
That should be a miracle! Would there be headlines, "First
foreigner ever completely mastered the complexity of the e
muet"?

Supersedes: <e-muet-20220506212807@ram.dialup.fu-berlin.de>
[changed the first line of the last paragraph]

ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) writes:
>People do not have a word for someone who learned a single
>foreign language to perfection - because this is more difficult
>to measure and to grasp - quality instead of quantity. It
>does not sound as impressive although it might actually be
>as difficult or more difficult than to "speak" eleven languages.

For one example: Fouché devotes 50 pages to the e muet
(Pierre Fouché, Traité de prononciation française, 2nd edn.,
Paris, 1969) and said in his lectures at the Sorbonne that
no foreigner could ever completely master the complexity of
this subject.

Now imagine that in spite of Fouché's prediction, some foreigner
had completely mastered the complexity of this subject.
That should be a miracle! Would there be headlines, "First
foreigner ever completely mastered the complexity of the e
muet"?

In article <b87f0049-b196-41a7-b516-2394c8cbf8e3n@googlegroups.com>,
Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@verizon.net> wrote:

[Chomsky discussion deleted]

>Language departments are often named "Language and Linguistics"
>these days.

Of course the one at MIT has always (AFAIK) been the Department of
Linguistics and Philosophy. (We share a building.) Or "Course 24" if
you want to sound really obscure and insider-ish.[1]

-GAWollman

[1] I had to look that one up; it's not as well known as 6, 8, 18, or
even 21. The numbering is not obvious: the original course numbers
were assigned in order of each department's founding, but as some
departments have closed or merged and new ones have been created, they
are no longer in any obvious order.
--
Garrett A. Wollman | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can,
wollman@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future. This is
Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
my employers. | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)

On Friday, May 6, 2022 at 6:04:05 PM UTC-4, Garrett Wollman wrote:
> In article <b87f0049-b196-41a7...@googlegroups.com>,
> Peter T. Daniels <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:

> [Chomsky discussion deleted]
> >Language departments are often named "Language and Linguistics"
> >these days.
> Of course the one at MIT has always (AFAIK) been the Department of
> Linguistics and Philosophy. (We share a building.) Or "Course 24" if
> you want to sound really obscure and insider-ish.[1]
>
> -GAWollman
>
> [1] I had to look that one up; it's not as well known as 6, 8, 18, or
> even 21. The numbering is not obvious: the original course numbers
> were assigned in order of each department's founding, but as some
> departments have closed or merged and new ones have been created, they
> are no longer in any obvious order.

He seems to have been hired as a Harvard Fellow on Nelson Goodman's
recommendation, but Harvard had no place for him, so they squeezed
him into MIT's Philosophy Department? and renamed it when he became
notorious a few years later?

On Fri, 6 May 2022, at 22:04:01, Garrett Wollman posted:
>Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>[Chomsky discussion deleted]
>
>>Language departments are often named "Language and Linguistics"
>>these days.
>
>Of course the one at MIT has always (AFAIK) been the Department of
>Linguistics and Philosophy. (We share a building.)

I'll tell my #2 daughter. It seems (to me) to be an unusual combination,
but she applied for, was offered, and took up a place at University
College London (UCL) to read the same - though I don't remember the
order, whether it was L and Ph, or Ph and L.

--
Paul

On 8/05/2022 2:00 a.m., Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> On Friday, May 6, 2022 at 6:04:05 PM UTC-4, Garrett Wollman wrote:
>> In article <b87f0049-b196-41a7...@googlegroups.com>,
>> Peter T. Daniels <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>> [Chomsky discussion deleted]
>>> Language departments are often named "Language and Linguistics"
>>> these days.
>> Of course the one at MIT has always (AFAIK) been the Department of
>> Linguistics and Philosophy. (We share a building.) Or "Course 24" if
>> you want to sound really obscure and insider-ish.[1]
>>
>> -GAWollman
>>
>> [1] I had to look that one up; it's not as well known as 6, 8, 18, or
>> even 21. The numbering is not obvious: the original course numbers
>> were assigned in order of each department's founding, but as some
>> departments have closed or merged and new ones have been created, they
>> are no longer in any obvious order.
>
> He seems to have been hired as a Harvard Fellow on Nelson Goodman's
> recommendation, but Harvard had no place for him, so they squeezed
> him into MIT's Philosophy Department? and renamed it when he became
> notorious a few years later?
>

No. Linguistics was first taught in the Department of Modern Languages.
Morris Halle was hired in 1951. Chomsky was a Harvard Fellow from 1951
to 1955, when he got his PhD (from Penn) and his job alongside Halle.
Philosophy was taught in the Department of Humanities. Linguistics and
Philosophy were not combined until 1976.

https://libraries.mit.edu/mithistory/research/schools-and-departments/school-of-humanities-arts-and-social-sciences/department-of-linguistics-and-philosophy/

In article <e51765f8-dc30-4628-b0cc-293e3b1591a4n@googlegroups.com>,
Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@verizon.net> wrote:
>[Chomsky] seems to have been hired as a Harvard Fellow on Nelson Goodman's
>recommendation, but Harvard had no place for him, so they squeezed
>him into MIT's Philosophy Department? and renamed it when he became
>notorious a few years later?

I have a suspicion that philosophy was part of Course 21 (Humanities)
prior to the advent of the separate department. Linguistics and
language technology research at the time was largely located in the
Research Laboratory of Electronics, part of the School of Engineering,
where Chomsky, Fred Lukoff, Betty Jean Shefts, and Joseph Applegate
all worked on machine translation under Victor Yngve in 1955; most RLE
researchers would have had appointments in Course 6 (Electrical
Engineering). As late as the 1980s, there remained a strong
philosophical divide between the language technology people (still in
RLE) and the natural-language-processing people (in the Artificial
Intelligence Lab): the RLE folks were interested in concrete,
numerical modeling of language processes, especially speech, with an
eye towards commercial applications, and the AI folks cared about more
abstract and symbolic approaches, largely directed at parsing text.[1]

RLE was at that time located in the famous Building 20, a World War II
"temporary" structure that was finally demolished in the late 1990s,
and the Linguistics & Philosophy department was based there until the
building was demolished to make way for the current building we share.
(L&P is in our building because they were the last academic department
left in Building 20, so they were promised space in the new building
to get them to move out.)

Anyway, back to Course 21: in researching this, I found that L&P
offers two programs, 21-1 (Philosophy) and 21-2 (Linguistics and
Philosophy) -- there is no stand-alone linguistics degree program.[2]

-GAWollman

[1] The RLE folks are responsible for the annoying interactive voice
response telephone systems that insist you talk at them and then reply
to everything you say with "I'm sorry, I didn't understand that" until
you finally give up. The AI Lab NLU folks, on the other hand,
produced little if anything of any consequence and largely got wiped
out in the "AI Winter". The current generation of statistical NLP
largely came out of other institutions, although MIT has many
investigators in the field today because that's where most current
research and funding is.

[2] Contrast Course VI, which historically offered 6-1, 6-2, and 6-3
as distinct EE-focused, CS-focused, and EE-and-CS programs. There's a
lot of concern that interest in the EE-heavy programs has dropped off,
as fewer and fewer students have any inclination to hacking hardware
when nearly all the hardware in their lives is designed to discourage
exploration.
--
Garrett A. Wollman | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can,
wollman@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future. This is
Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
my employers. | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)

* Garrett Wollman:

> In article <e51765f8-dc30-4628-b0cc-293e3b1591a4n@googlegroups.com>,
> Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@verizon.net> wrote:
>>[Chomsky] seems to have been hired as a Harvard Fellow on Nelson Goodman's
>>recommendation, but Harvard had no place for him, so they squeezed
>>him into MIT's Philosophy Department? and renamed it when he became
>>notorious a few years later?
>
> I have a suspicion that philosophy was part of Course 21 (Humanities)
> prior to the advent of the separate department. Linguistics and
> language technology research at the time was largely located in the
> Research Laboratory of Electronics, part of the School of Engineering,
> where Chomsky, Fred Lukoff, Betty Jean Shefts, and Joseph Applegate
> all worked on machine translation under Victor Yngve in 1955; most RLE
> researchers would have had appointments in Course 6 (Electrical
> Engineering). As late as the 1980s, there remained a strong
> philosophical divide between the language technology people (still in
> RLE) and the natural-language-processing people (in the Artificial
> Intelligence Lab): the RLE folks were interested in concrete,
> numerical modeling of language processes, especially speech, with an
> eye towards commercial applications, and the AI folks cared about more
> abstract and symbolic approaches, largely directed at parsing text.[1]

That's a new one for me. What I'm used to is the terminological tension
between Computational Linguistics, which is usually located in the
Humanities, and Natural Language Processing, the term preferred by
Engineering Faculties.

--
Never trust ale from a god-fearing people.
-- Quark

On Saturday, May 7, 2022 at 6:58:14 PM UTC-4, Garrett Wollman wrote:
> In article <e51765f8-dc30-4628...@googlegroups.com>,
> Peter T. Daniels <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:

> >[Chomsky] seems to have been hired as a Harvard Fellow on Nelson Goodman's
> >recommendation, but Harvard had no place for him, so they squeezed
> >him into MIT's Philosophy Department? and renamed it when he became
> >notorious a few years later?
>
> I have a suspicion that philosophy was part of Course 21 (Humanities)
> prior to the advent of the separate department. Linguistics and
> language technology research at the time was largely located in the
> Research Laboratory of Electronics, part of the School of Engineering,
> where Chomsky, Fred Lukoff, Betty Jean Shefts, and Joseph Applegate
> all worked on machine translation under Victor Yngve in 1955; most RLE

Vic Yngve had some sort of fight/feud with Chomsky and moved to
the University of Chicago, where he was in the Linguistics, "Psychology,"
and Information Sciences Departments and the Graduate School of
Library Science. His office and classroom were in the last. He promoted
something called "human linguistics." The outline of his book was on
his blackboard for as long as I knew him, and the book turned out to be
very thin.

He invented and taught a language called COMIT II, which was intended
to be language-like, i.e. somehow incorporating early Chomskyan
linguistics. After my one-semester course, I participated in I. J. Gelb's
*Computer-Aided Analysis of Amorite* (my term paper had been a
program to analyze triliteral Semitic roots for what Greenberg had
called "root incompatibility" regarding Arabic; something similar had
been published for Biblical Hebrew and a part of it had been recognized
for Akkadian), and since the huge corpus of Amorite names had already
been digitized (this is 1976), it was easy to apply there).

A really nice guy but very diffident.

> researchers would have had appointments in Course 6 (Electrical
> Engineering). As late as the 1980s, there remained a strong
> philosophical divide between the language technology people (still in
> RLE) and the natural-language-processing people (in the Artificial
> Intelligence Lab): the RLE folks were interested in concrete,
> numerical modeling of language processes, especially speech, with an
> eye towards commercial applications, and the AI folks cared about more
> abstract and symbolic approaches, largely directed at parsing text.[1]
>
> RLE was at that time located in the famous Building 20, a World War II
> "temporary" structure that was finally demolished in the late 1990s,
> and the Linguistics & Philosophy department was based there until the
> building was demolished to make way for the current building we share.
> (L&P is in our building because they were the last academic department
> left in Building 20, so they were promised space in the new building
> to get them to move out.)

Building 20 is in the title of a Festschrift for one of the MIT linguists.

The History of Linguistics society did a session at the 2016 LSA
meeting in Boston for Halle's 90th birthday on the history of MIT
linguistics. The talks didn't get published as a group. The last time
Chomsky had anything to do with the LSA was at a Golden Anniversary
symposium at UMass Amherst in 1974. He won't have an obituary in
*Language*, because for many years now, that privilege has been reserved
for past presidents of the LSA.

> Anyway, back to Course 21: in researching this, I found that L&P
> offers two programs, 21-1 (Philosophy) and 21-2 (Linguistics and
> Philosophy) -- there is no stand-alone linguistics degree program.[2]
>
> -GAWollman
>
> [1] The RLE folks are responsible for the annoying interactive voice
> response telephone systems that insist you talk at them and then reply
> to everything you say with "I'm sorry, I didn't understand that" until
> you finally give up.

Keep saying "Rep re sen ta tive," louder and louder, and eventually _it_
gives up.

> The AI Lab NLU folks, on the other hand,
> produced little if anything of any consequence and largely got wiped
> out in the "AI Winter". The current generation of statistical NLP
> largely came out of other institutions, although MIT has many
> investigators in the field today because that's where most current
> research and funding is.

Not to mention the Media Lab, which apparently has one of the best
publicity departments of any academic institution in the world -- but
does it ever actually produce results?

Incidentally "Parallel Distributed Processing" made a huge splash
in linguistics when it came out, but it very soon proved to be inadequate
to deal with language-in-the-brain (which since then neuroscience has
shown to be a lot more complicated than Broca and Wernicke imagined).

> [2] Contrast Course VI, which historically offered 6-1, 6-2, and 6-3
> as distinct EE-focused, CS-focused, and EE-and-CS programs. There's a
> lot of concern that interest in the EE-heavy programs has dropped off,
> as fewer and fewer students have any inclination to hacking hardware
> when nearly all the hardware in their lives is designed to discourage
> exploration.

* "Peter T. Daniels" <a0a6dccb-b052-4e3e-a49b-8f61aeefa8d2n @googlegroups.com> :
Wrote on Tue, 10 May 2022 07:37:26 -0700 (PDT):
>> -GAWollman
>>
>> [1] The RLE folks are responsible for the annoying interactive voice
>> response telephone systems that insist you talk at them and then reply
>> to everything you say with "I'm sorry, I didn't understand that" until
>> you finally give up.
>
> Keep saying "Rep re sen ta tive," louder and louder, and eventually _it_
> gives up.
>
>> The AI Lab NLU folks, on the other hand,
>> produced little if anything of any consequence

and for that reason it will be more merciful for them on judgment day,
than the for workers of iniquity at rle

>> and largely got wiped out in the "AI Winter".

>> The current generation of statistical NLP
>> largely came out of other institutions, although MIT has many
>> investigators in the field today because that's where most current
>> research and funding is.
>
> Not to mention the Media Lab, which apparently has one of the best
> publicity departments of any academic institution in the world -- but
> does it ever actually produce results?

it *is* the "results" ("the medium is the massage")

> Incidentally "Parallel Distributed Processing" made a huge splash
> in linguistics when it came out, but it very soon proved to be inadequate
> to deal with language-in-the-brain (which since then neuroscience has
> shown to be a lot more complicated than Broca and Wernicke imagined).
>
>> [2] Contrast Course VI, which historically offered 6-1, 6-2, and 6-3
>> as distinct EE-focused, CS-focused, and EE-and-CS programs. There's a
>> lot of concern that interest in the EE-heavy programs has dropped off,
>> as fewer and fewer students have any inclination to hacking hardware
>> when nearly all the hardware in their lives is designed to discourage
>> exploration.

On Fri, 06 May 2022 15:30:29 +0100, Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com>
wrote:

>On 2022-05-06, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
>> On Thursday, May 5, 2022 at 6:05:00 PM UTC-4, Quinn C wrote:
>>> * Peter T. Daniels:
>>> > On Wednesday, May 4, 2022 at 6:12:31 PM UTC-4, snide...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> >> Stefan Ram submitted this gripping article, maybe on Wednesday:
>>> >>> r...@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) writes:
>>> >
>>> >>>> Many linguist have made this experience, when they reveal
>>> >>>> that they are linguists, they are immediately asked,
>>> >>>> "And how many languages do you speak?".
>>> >>> I am sorry for not having given a source, but now I can give
>>> >>> you one source for this! Monica (Macaulay?) gives a talk
>>> >>> that one can hear in the video "What is Linguistics and What
>>> >>> Can it do for Us?". And there she says around minute 9 - 10:
>>> >>>> First of all, not all linguists speak lots of languages,
>>> >>>> and every single linguist in this room has had the
>>> >>>> experience of: you say you're a linguist, and people
>>> >>>> respond and say, "Oh! How many languages do you speak?".
>>> >
>>> > That's true.
>>> >
>>> >>> . I viewed this video once, and then that report must have
>>> >>> become part of my background knowledge, but I have forgotten
>>> >>> the exact source. Now, that I'm coincidentally watching this
>>> >>> video again, I have found a source for my claim!
>>> >>>> Best answer: "I speak one language, my native language.
>>> >>>> And also I study ...".
>>> >
>>> > That's how I answer it.
>>> But doesn't, to my mind, imply that the asker thought that was the only
>>> meaning of "linguist". I think many people assume that studying
>>> languages on an academic level involves learning many languages.
>>
>> It involves learning _about_ many languages.
>>
>> A Cornell undergraduate had to have a "funny language" for a B.A.
>> in linguistics -- Hindi counted, but Sanskrit didn't; Modern Hebrew
>> (mine) did, but Biblical Hebrew didn't.
>
>So it had to be a funny *living* language?
>
>
>> I don't remember what Chicago required for the Ph.D. (beyond the
>> general Humanities Division requirement of two additional languages
>> of scholarship), but I had classes in a bunch of classical Semitic languages.
>>
>>> In fact, many linguists do learn several, and it is usual and advisable
>>> to learn at least one language not closely related to your native one.
>>> It's just not as central to being a linguist as people assume.
>>
>> At Penn, Chomsky did Classical Arabic with the two greatest Arabists
>> of the 20th century (both refugees), Giorgio Levi Della Vida, who returned
>> to Italy after the war, and Franz Rosenthal, who found a home at Yale.
>> His Modern Hebrew related to summer camp at a kibbutz.
>>
>> Except for a handful of examples in Spanish for a talk given in Central
>> America, after his M.A. he never said anything about any language but
>> English. One of his best-known students, George Lakoff, boasted of
>> never having learned any foreign language.
>>
>> The growing difficulties with his approach to language became
>> apparent as MIT attracted graduate students from abroad, who
>> attempted to apply it to their own languages -- the first ones were
>> Japanese, Italian, and Hungarian (two of them quite different from
>> English). The terminology remained resolutely Anglocentric, as
>> when the had to invent the term "pro-drop languages" for Italian,
>> which doesn't require a subject pronoun with a verb (since the verb
>> inflection identifies the person of the subject). English is fairly
>> unusual in this respect, so the special term should refer to "pronoun-
>> requiring" rather than pronoun-"dropping."
>>
>>> Also, the more traditional majors associated with languages (like
>>> "Slavic languages") did involve learning multiple languages.
>>
>> Language departments are often named "Language and Linguistics"
>> these days.

There once was a girl from Purdue,
Who kept a young cat in her pew.
She taught it to speak
Alphabetical Greek,
But it never got farther than µ