HENRY

Derek Bickerton’s got an interesting paper on his website, Language Evolution: A brief guide for linguists:

While most linguists were looking the other way, so many books, articles and collections on the evolution of language have been appearing that one can hardly keep pace with them.  Accordingly, many linguists have a lot of catching-up to do, and their task is not made any easier by the fact that knowledge of linguistics alone won’t get them far.  This is an interdisciplinary game, played by biologists, neurologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, computer scientists, philosophers, and more–as well as, or maybe I should say a good deal more than, by linguists.  Therefore as a player with twenty years’ experience I feel it incumbent on me to provide, for any linguists who might feel like joining the game, a rough map of this unfamiliar terrain, and to give them the kind of information guide-books usually give on the value of the various goods and services available there.   People can, of course, study whatever they choose, but there is perhaps no other field of human inquiry which has been so vitiated by a failure to get priorities straight.

Posted on October 13th, 2007 by Simon Greenhill