From The New York Times
Our False Beliefs About Language
By Geoffrey Nunberg
For nearly a century, linguists have been struggling to unseat the accumulated dogma that “masquerades as common sense,” as the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield put it in 1933. That’s the challenge that faces every developing science, but linguistics seems to have had a harder time than most. People who readily accept the principles of modern economics, psychology and biology still cling to notions about language that are as antiquated as a belief in physiocracy or leeching.
According to Robert Lane Greene, a correspondent for The Economist, the problem here is a failure to communicate: “Linguists have only themselves to blame for not getting the word out better about what they do.” That’s not quite fair; the field has been pretty well served by its popularizers, among them scholars like Steven Pinker, John McWhorter and David Crystal. Still, the territory is clearly worth revisiting, and Greene’s “You Are What You Speak” is a very readable survey of all the ways our received ideas about language can lead us astray.
Greene makes it his business to dispel popular misconceptions, large and small. (Politicians and pundits, please note: the Chinese word for “crisis” is not composed of the characters for “danger” and “opportunity.”) To that end, he visits with the University of Pennsylvania’s Mark Liberman, a multifaceted scholar who serves as a one-man truth squad at the Language Log blog, of which he is a co-founder....