Two letters from the latest LRB column (Vol. 47 No. 16 · 11 September 2025; archived):
Colin Kidd, writing about Stefan Collini’s history of English studies in Britain, mentions that ‘Anglo-Saxon is still a compulsory element in the English curriculum at Oxford despite a campaign in the 1990s to abolish it’ (LRB, 14 August). In a short interview with Mary Bennett, principal of St Hilda’s College, at the end of my first term in 1970, I politely complained about the tedium of studying Anglo-Saxon and was politely put right: the correct expression was Old English, not Anglo-Saxon (this despite our set handbooks being Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer and Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader). I was also informed that the purpose of the Oxford English course was to prepare the one in twenty or so future Oxford English scholars with the comprehensive knowledge necessary for a career in teaching and research. I wonder how much has changed since those days – one of my tutors, Anne Elliott, told me that nothing of value had been written after 1830.
Sharon Footerman
London NW4Colin Kidd notes the survival of compulsory Anglo-Saxon in the Oxford English syllabus. When I was an undergraduate at Manchester in the early 1970s, we had to study Old English, as it was called, for all three years of the honours course. This was at the insistence of the professor of English language, G.L. Brook, who had been appointed in 1945 and whose approach to the subject was exclusively philological. I once heard him complain that the publication of his edition of the Harley Lyrics had been held up for years because the publishers required some commentary on the literary value of the poems, and he couldn’t think of anything to say.
Paul Dean
Oxford
I too can’t think of anything to say.
To clarify a possible false implicature: the so-called Harley Lyrics are found in a 14th-century manuscript and whether or not they have any literary value they are not in Old English alias Anglo-Saxon.
Did Anne Elliott mean “Nothing of value had been written after 1830” in Old English or on Old English?
Old English Wikipedia has 4,926 articles but I can’t say whether any are of value.
one of my tutors, Anne Elliott, told me that nothing of value had been written after 1830.
This appears to be at variance with the facts.
Heaven forbid that Oxford undergraduates be compelled to do anything which would not obviously conduce to their degrees leading to higher salaries once they graduate, or anything that they might find at all boring.
I believe that English degrees may be available from other universities than Oxford, if the customers don’t like the menu there. Though, given a succession of UK governments that are unable to see any value in a university education other than higher salaries for graduates and a higher GDP for the country, their days may be numbered.
“Anne Elliott” immediately suggests Persuasion, though IIRC, the [SPOILERS!!] future Mrs Wentworth had only one “t.”
When I took English Language 1 (or whatever it was actually called, I think that was it) at Glasgow in the late 90s one of the topics covered was Old English – I didn’t think that was a bad thing at the time, and I don’t now.
(It was compulsory for English Literature students, but only a whim for me – I think my language needs were supposed to be covered by Gaelic!)
Anne Elliott specialized in the English Romantic poets. That may explain the 1830 bit.
Another student recalls:
Randolph Quirk’s nice (and short) Old English grammar, first published in 1955, specifically says in the introduction that it is written primarily for the literary student of Old English, “who has long been neglected in favour of his philologically inclined colleague.”
(Quirk was professor of Eng Lang and Lit at UCL latterly, though he was at Durham in 1955; his co-author, C L Wrenn, was at Pembroke College, Oxford. There is just no pleasing some people.)
When the legendary English guitarist Wilko Johnson (1947-2022) was doing his bachelor’s degree in English at the non-Oxbridge Newcastle University in the late Sixties he became conversant with both Old English and Old Norse, neither of which were that widely known among rock and roll musicians of his generation. Although I don’t know if that was optional or mandatory in the curriculum. In the U.S. context, mandatory OE for English majors would have seemed pretty weird even in the days of greater rigor. At my alma mater in the Eighties, Engish majors (of whom I was not one) did have to take x% of their classes in pre-1800 authors and take a mandatory Very Important Poets survey which covered inter alia Chaucer (plus Spenser, Milton and I think Pope from the pre-1800 era). Although you could evade that by instead being a “Literature” major which entitled you to substitute e.g. Roland Barthes for Chaucer. If you wanted to, you could study Old English with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_C._Robinson, and get credit toward the English major, and some did. But not most. (I think I may have used my semester of Old Norse for credit toward the Linguistics major, but I’m not 100% on that.)
Considering how few departments of English still require the study of Old English compared to the number of departments which did so a generation ago, and indeed how few even have professors left with any genuine competence in Old English, some hatter(s) might be able to calculate the approximate date when ALL departments of English worldwide will reach the stage when Old English will neither be known by any faculty member(s) nor (of course) taught to any student(s).
Lest anyone think I am being irrationally pessimistic, this is QUITE relevant:
https://www.lingoblog.dk/en/silencing-the-vikings-bureaucracy-and-the-end-of-old-norse-at-aarhus-university/
Meanwhile, in the land of the Latin teachers’ lobby, Old English is compulsory for students of English who are studying to become teachers of English (in a Gymnasium), and Old Church Slavic is likewise compulsory for Russian.
…unless any of that has changed in the last 40 years, but I see no reason to expect that.
Edit: ah, maybe the problem in Denmark was too much autonomy for the universities, funnily enough. I can’t imagine the Republic of Austria hiring a management consultancy firm!
As someone who
(a) frequently reminds that secondary education is compulsory, that is children are very literally forced to go to school in every sense of the word “forced” (e.g. when I described DE’s support of vernacular education in Maghreb as ‘forcing children to study darja instead of forcing them to study fusha’ DE thought I wrote something ridiculous, but I think when what you want is to force (very literally) someone to do something, this detail is very important and you must remember about it)
(b) objects to mandatory L2 (English everywhere, Russian in L1-something else parts of Russia etc.)
I find it interesting, that “compulsory [course]” can also mean something different from (a) and (b).
Footerman was put right? How so? Why would it be wrong to call the language Anglo-Saxon instead of Old English? Both are correct.
“in the land of”
DM, is it Germany or Austria (or both)?
____
(I adopted ‘Slavonic’ for the specific literary langauge and ‘Slavic’ for everything else.
I see that many people – e.g. you and Hans – use these words differently, as synonyms I believe.
Iwonder how often my approach confuses people)
@ drasvi:
“(I adopted ‘Slavonic’ for the specific literary langauge and ‘Slavic’ for everything else.”
Someone once said to me one tends to be used in the US the other in the UK.
Otherwise there is no difference.
@drasvi: I use both “Slavonic” and “Slavic” for OCS and the various Church languages, while the language family or the ethnicity are always “Slavic” in my usage. In German, both are Slawisch (or Slavisch, if you are a slavicist). I started calling OCS “Old Church Slavonic” at some point when I saw it being called that in some of the English-language literature I used during my studies, and when I later noticed that this usage wasn’t universal, I stopped using “Slavonic” consistently for the church languages.
@drasvi:
Nobody forces you to study English at Oxford, or indeed to study anything there at all.
Should students be given the power to alter the syllabus of a university course they have already freely applied to and been accepted for, on the grounds that they find some parts of it dull and/or unlikely to enhance future salaries? Should their preferences override the opinion of their teachers about what a full grounding in the subject entails?
UK governments, which for decades have been aggressively pushing the view that university students are simply paying customers, just like the customers of a supermarket, would certainly say so.
Do you agree?
I suspect the hostility to Old English study among staff arises from the rather uneasy cohabitation of English Literature with English Language in university English departments. The naysayers are likely to be those who find all grammatical study repellent in general. Like Wordsworthians, with their simpleminded “murder to dissect” concept of science:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45557/the-tables-turned
[Full disclosure: I’m with Byron and Auden on the subject of Wordsworth.]
Of course, many Eng Lit types (and Woody Allen) lack the imagination to appreciate Old English literature:
https://time.com/archive/6953022/there-be-dragons/
Actual poets (Heaney, Auden) are not always so intellectualy insular.
When I was an undergraduate you could not major in philosophy w/o taking a compulsory intro course in “modern” philosophers which ran from Descartes to Kant (including en route Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and maybe someone else I’m forgetting). Some personality/governance conflict which caused much chaos and institutional paralysis in the department a few years after I graduated nominally involved whether or not it should also be compulsory (if you had chosen to matriculate at that specific university and to major in that specific subject) for undergraduates to read some Hegel. I think the pro-Hegel side failed to alter the status quo. As I have no doubt noted before, I voluntarily took a philosophy class in which we read Hegel, and exposure to Hegel then became one of the precipitating factors for my decision to major in linguistics instead of philosophy. (You also had to take an intro to ancient philosophy but at least that stuff is fun to read even if you think it’s all bunk substantively.)
@Etienne: I think it will be a long time before Old English is not taught anywhere in the English-speaking world.
Lest you think I’m being optimistic, I think there could be a time much sooner when a significant fraction of the few students of Old English and Old Norse are “Aryan” supremacists.
David E.: UK governments, which for decades have been aggressively pushing the view that university students are simply paying customers, just like the customers of a supermarket, would certainly say so.
I’m far removed from any university debate, but what I have picked up of criticism is rather that New Public Management type policies make universities into commissioned producers of degrees, which leads to cost-efficient program studies with a fixed progression through a fixed syllabus of broad, general courses and little room for smaller subjects.
You say tomatoes …
@JF:
I think Aryan supremacists are not much interested in actual scholarship. They prefer fantasy pseudoscholarship, and actually learning an unfamiliar language, however ideologically favoured, would smack of unmanly wokeness. What they would do instead is pick on particular OE or ON lexemes and attribute mystical properties to them. (One wonders how many Hindutva nutters can actually read Sanskrit …)
Having said that, there have been elements of this among real scholars. Gordon’s Old Norse manual has a bit in the introduction along the lines of how the English character still fortunately preserves some elements of the solid Norse virtue of steadfastness in misfortune … this sort of thing was fairly mainstream in his day.
There is also the problem that Aryan supremacists would be unable to use the existing grammatical and lexical resources for Old English and Old Norse, because they contain the forbidden word “gender.”
To this day Icelandic apparently uses Kyn (málfræði) to mean “Gender (grammatical),” with cognates doing the same work in other North Germanic languages, so adding a relevant sense in English of either “kin” or “kind” to get the soppy Romance jargon out of our mouths should work just fine.
A little more than kin, and less than kind…
In itself, “kind” as a grammatical term of art is no worse than “gender.”
In the context of (say) the eight “kinds” of Swahili or the twelve of Ditammari, “kind” as an ordinary English term has the drawback that it implies a greater semantic unity for most of these “kinds” than is actually present (at least for the majority of them), but then “gender” has an even less appropriate non-grammatical sense (as rozele has often pointed out.)
However, the task of Bowdlerising linguistic works for the use of Aryan supremacists would be time-consuming, and there is probably not enough time left to accomplish it before the collapse of Western civilisation, when the Aryan supremacists will all be eaten, poor things. (Delusionary worldviews are not conducive to survival without considerable social support.)
Jerry Friedman: Actually, I once came up with a similar scenario to give historical Celtic linguistics a nice shot in the arm.
Consider the fact that there exist modern songs in Gaulish, such as this one –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEzk_3XPi2c
-the lyrics of which, incidentally, were composed by a very serious Celtic scholar, David Stifter.
Now, musical group fandoms can exhibit a slight…overenthusiasm which less diplomatic people than myself would call insanely obsessive. The more obsessive members might be so obsessed as to actually… seriously study Celtic comparative linguistics to get all the nuances of their favorite songs.
Things would get even more interesting if some other musical group, with as obsessive a fan base, collaborating with some other Celtic scholar, came up with a version of Gaulish in their own songs which would be…at odds (INSERT AUDIBLE GASP HERE) in some details with the version found in the song above.
In which case…well, newspaper headlines about violence between members of different musical fandoms relating to the phonology and morphosyntax of Gaulish might become common, with the local police department giving its officers seminars on controversial issues in Celtic linguistics*.
And, in a completely unrelated development, local Universities in cities where such violence becomes common are FLOODED with student demand for classes in comparative Celtic and ancillary fields (Indo-European, historical linguistics…), leading to a hiring frenzy, with a bidding war between the various Universities (involving salaries and working conditions and the like…) taking place as they seek to get the qualified scholars needed to deal with the flood of students obsessed with knowing what Gaulish was really like…
And as more and more musical groups join the trend and consult with scholars to compose songs in Oscan and Punic and Gothic and Middle Egyptian and Sanskrit and other ancient languages, others wishing to connect with ancestors whose languages were unwritten will collaborate with scholars to compose songs in Proto-Uralic, Proto-Algonquian and Proto-Mayan and other reconstructed proto-languages. This will again lead to violence between different fandoms and to old-fashioned philology and historical linguistics facing the (quite new) problem of drowning with too many students and research money and too few qualified scholars…some of whom, walking across their campus, might throw a coin or two in the direction of the bearded panhandler who once was a leading theoretical linguist but who fell behind the times**…
*Actually, my understanding is that the police in Pasadena, California, had to break up so many fistfights between hard-drinking physicists and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that the local police officers needed to be taught the basics of controversial issues in physics in order to understand the nature of the “verbal provocation” which triggered so many of these individual fistfights. I was not there and do not know whether this is true, of course…but as the saying goes, SE NON È VERO, È BEN TROVATO.
**Well, I can dream, right?
Austria; Germany less so.
In both countries, however, the efforts to degrade the students to customers have failed.
, and Old Church Slavic is likewise compulsory for Russian.
…unless any of that has changed in the last 40 years, but I see no reason to expect that
I can attest that it was the same in Germany, and I remember that many of the 80% of my co–students who had chosen Slavistics for the poets and novelists dreaded / hated the obligatory OCS course. I loved it, of course.
I don’t know how it is now, and unlike DM I can see many reasons why that might have changed…
From The Bell Jar:
I decided to junk the whole honours programme and become an ordinary English major. I went to look up the requirements of an ordinary English major at my college.
There were lots of requirements, and I didn’t have half of them. One of the requirements was a course in the eighteenth century. I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason. So I’d skipped it. They let you do that in honours, you were much freer. I had been so free I’d spent most of my time on Dylan Thomas.
A friend of mine, also in honours, had managed never to read a word of Shakespeare; but she was a real expert on the Four Quartets.
I saw how impossible and embarrassing it would be for me to try to switch from my free programme into the stricter one. So I looked up the requirements for English majors at the city college where my mother taught.
They were even worse.
You had to know Old English and the History of the English Language and a representative selection of all that had been written from Beowulf to the present day.
This surprised me. I had always looked down on my mother’s college, as it was co-ed, and filled with people who couldn’t get scholarships to the big eastern colleges.
Now I saw that the stupidest person at my mother’s college knew more than I did. I saw they wouldn’t even let me in through the door, let alone give me a large scholarship like the one I had at my own college.
_The Bell Jar_ was of course marketed as a novel although it is claimed in hindsight to have been “semi-autobiographical.” FWIW, the author’s mother Aurelia Plath was an “associate professor of medical secretarial skills” at Boston University. BU has almost certainly moved upmarket in the 70+ years since the time in which the novel is set, and no longer offers degrees in secretarial skills. Although also FWIW as of a few decades ago I was told that BU’s English Department was old-fashioned enough that if you wanted to pursue a graduate degree focused on arcane philological skills like comparing medieval manuscripts in order to prepare a critical edition of such-and-such text it was a good place for that sort of thing that was no longer really taught at trendier places.
> The more obsessive members might be so obsessed as to actually… seriously study Celtic comparative linguistics to get all the nuances of their favorite songs.
Not in big enough numbers to effect Etienne’s dream, but I have seen this is in real fandoms — Anglophone danmei fans studying Chinese to try to read more untranslated novels (or to better appreciate the translations they have); Tolkien fans who make the jump from his appendices to his conlangs to his Old English work. Hey, on topic example! I guess Anne Elliott didn’t think much of Tolkien? 😛
And anime fans studying japanese is a TIRED old weeb stereotype but also sometimes true
@JWB:
Any UK consultant physician or surgeon can confirm that medical secretaries are some of the least well compensated in the entire system for the skills that they need to do their job even adequately, let alone well. I don’t think it would be at all inappropriate to offer degrees in the subject.
Not convinced that they should end up as a requirement, though. There are still a few practising UK doctors without a university degree, who seem to be perfectly competent. Unsurprising, as the university education of doctors is simply vocational training with pretensions to academic status.
I never learnt anything useful about actual surgery from a book or a lecture (though I did learn a lot of useful stuff germane to my practice overall.)
“Higher” management types regularly float the idea that medical secretaries could be replaced by outsourced dictation-transcription systems (or, cheaper yet, by getting consultants to do it all themselves), thereby confirming one’s impression that they have no actual idea what any non-management staff actually do all day.
Our delightful health secretary, and the walking dead Tony Blair, believe that it can all be done by LLMs, demonstrating that they don’t know how LLMs work either. (Well, Blair knows that their makers funnel large amounts of money to him. It is enough …)
> The more obsessive members might be so obsessed as to actually… seriously study Celtic comparative linguistics to get all the nuances of their favorite songs.
c’mon over to the yiddish world, where historical/topolectal conversations are routine in any songwriting workshop, and any song-learning circle past the most elementary! (not least because half the time you can’t make the damn rhymes work without it) (also because the yiddish cultural revitalization movement is an assemblage of lovely archive rats building on a century’s work by semi-professional folklorists)
there’s not a ton of comparative philology in the mix, but there is more and more as people take the “coterritorial” parallel works more seriously – f’r’instance: i’m having to work out how to dig into some polish folksong material right now, since a yiddish song i’m working with seems to be based on one*. and with michael alpert firmly anchored in scotland, i expect exciting yiddish/scots explorations in the near future.
.
* with the substitution of rebbe for mother, and pears for nuts. de gustibus…
@David E.: the reasons you would be surprised to find explicit instruction in how-to-be-a-medical-secretary at a “prestigious” U.S.university (as opposed to a community college) these days are all about class snobbery rather than any sort of empirical evaluation of the usefulness of the resultant skills. Indeed, many of the highest-prestige private U.S. universities still refuse to offer bachelor’s degrees that are explicitly in “business administration.” Because it is vulgar for a gentleman to be in trade. There’s also a complex story about how the opening to women of occupations previously closed to them back in the Sixties/Seventies often led to (often undeserved!) disdain for various occupations previously dominated by them in the Bad Old Days.
I speculate that the current wholesale closure of language instruction in universities everywhere, for languages common and rare, current and ancient, is driven by the idea that you can nowadays learn these languages online, through apps or classes.
I’m not arguing for or against that idea, just saying that it could be what cost-cutting administrators are thinking.
I think this is unusual for the US, but I studied Old English in high school. My mandatory* started 11th grade English class was British Literature and started with a month long unit on OE. Mostly Beowulf but also a handful of shorter poems (I liked The Wanderer and The Wife’s Lament). I’m sure we didn’t cover the material in much depth, and we mostly focused on modern English translations, but it was a good basis for further study (or in my case, reading linguistics blogs and talking to Tolkien fans on the internet 😛 )
By the time my younger sister reached that grade 3 years later, BritLit had been relaced with AP English Language, which despite the name was basically an American Lit class. Consequently, she has read Huck Finn but not Beowulf, and I vice versa.**
(Both of us pursued STEM fields in postsecondary, and we both took some great humanities breadth requirements — a Ling101 class is why i hang out on this blog! — but neither of us opted for literature classes.)
*In mind of the debate about compulsory classes above — I did have a choice between Honors British Literature and (regular) American Literature. Given my experience with regular vs. honors history in 10th grade I was very eager to take every honors class I could, though as much because of the classmates as the curriculum.
**Though I just started on it last week! Thank you Project Gutenberg <3
@David Eddyshaw. Here is the passage you had in mind:
“In Old Norse literature the tastes and ideals of the Germanic race found their most vital expression, and if we would understand our own culture we ought to know this literature ; the tastes and ideals embodied in it are still part of our racial heritage. We have still, fortunately, some part of the cool rationalism and heroic obstinacy which the sagas prove to be characteristic of our Germanic forefathers” (E. V. Gordon, An Introduction to Old Norse, first edition, 1927, passage repeated in the second, 1957, p. [vii]). https://archive.org/details/AnIntroductionToOldNorse/page/n1/mode/1up
Yes. My memory had actually toned it down somewhat …
(Far from my books at present.)
Par for the course in 1927; less so, one might have hoped, in 1957. The more of a pity, as what Gordon has to say about Old Icelandic literature is generally interesting, and not at all logically dependent on this sort of racial essentialism.
@de, jwb
The degree subjects for professions (Medicine, Engineering, Law) are not about professional training (there are non-degree and post-degree courses for this), they are about reducing numbers, so that professional prestige and salary expectations are maintained. Engineers have to build things, so there is a 3-track system (technician, professional, and project management). In the legal and medical areas, there is no management track and the technicians (nurses, paralegals) require a professional to sign off on any work they do, creating gross inefficiencies undreamt of in Engineering.
I had the experience as an undergraduate of trying Old Norse and Old Irish (the latter almost entirely in translation after the rudiments of the grammar defeated me) in back-to-back semesters, which sort of maximized the contrast between the different cultural/literary sensibilities. Despite the obviously mixed Germanic/Celtic heritage of the British peoples, one can hardly imagine a respectable Anglophone academic of Gordon’s generation talking about the antics of the characters in the Old Irish narratives as providing some sort of gentlemanly role model for 20th century Britons. Although they are not without heroic obstinacy, I suppose.
Gordon was born and raised in British Columbia, with significant-if-not-entire Scottish ancestry, so you would think he ought to have been open to the presence of Celticity in “our racial heritage.”
@DE, IF all students are interested in is “salaries” and all that guides them in their choice of courses is “salaries” – as you seem to think (???) – then yes, yes, yes.
ButI don’t think you really believe in this! Besides, normally, students trust professors (when they do not, we have a worse problem) so the problem “the professor thinks some course is useful, students don’t understand why” cna be solved in a better way. More collaborative than “either they obey, or professors obey”.
Also the word “compulsion” here is not mine. I exactly note that its meaning here is different from its meanign in “compulsory education”!
the rudiments of the grammar defeated me
I don’t think Old Irish grammar actually has rudiments. It just starts immediately with complications.
they are not without heroic obstinacy, I suppose
Y Gododdin is all about losing, gloriously and spectacularly, which may indeed be an integral part of our heritage in the UK.(Mind you, there is some suspicion that the uniformly doomed protagonists were overwhelmed on account of being extremely hung over, or perhaps actually drunk. Then again, that, too …)
What de said. If you know the modern language, you can sometimes puzzle things out, due to very conservative orthography in the modern language.
All my life has been devoted to learning languages. At school I did German and French, but in my teens decided to ditch European for Asian. And I was only interested in languages you could actually speak, because I wanted to be able to speak and write them as living languages. So even when some other students were looking into Classical Japanese I took no interest in it. When teachers taught Chinese chéngyǔ I paid minimal attention because I considered such relics of the Classical language of little relevance to learning to speak Chinese. Of course, in my later-in-life focus on learning Mongolian, Classical Mongolian was the furthest thing from my mind.
And now, when it’s too late, I regret my narrowness. Of course I’d picked up snippets of knowledge, but it’s no match for having learnt it properly and systematically when my brain was fresh and plastic. (Things that I can see now, like the almost total loss of adnominal verb forms in Japanese and the partial loss of the distinction between adnominal and final verb forms in Mongolian — which screw up grammatical categorisation in many modern grammars by native Mongolian grammarians — would have become clearer to me much earlier.) I now wish I’d studied Classical Japanese, Classical Chinese, and even Classical Mongolian while I could. (Along with several other languages, but that’s another story.)
So when I read of people chafing against learning Old English, I can only shake my head at their narrow-minded ignorance. Without a knowledge of that early stage of the language, how can they either understand or appreciate what the language is like today? As long as they don’t go on some obscure Saxonist or racial tangent, a knowledge of Anglo-Saxon can only enrich and illuminate their knowledge of modern English. Like my younger self, they are narrow, benighted fools.
Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait…
No, it’s more-or-less-conservative legislators who think that’s how it is and/or that’s how it ought to be.
Hostile as I am to political conservativism, I think this is a bum rap: it is philistine rather than conservative* legislators who are to blame; the Gradgrind Tendency. And the Gradgrind Tendency has also long since taken over the Labour Party here too.
* At least until traditional political conservativism was largely killed off by the hyperphilistine neoliberals in the 1980s.
Yes, it’s traditionally lefties over here who have demanded colleges get rid of dusty old (colonialist/hegemonic) required courses and provide “relevant” ones. (Still bitter about my alma mater having given in to such demands and ditched the invaluable History of Civilization class.)
i don’t post links to (or read) anything published in the NYStürmer, but i gather they’ve just published an op-ed pointing out that student desires and demand have nothing whatsoever to do with these restructurings of the tertiary-education industry; they’re invoked (cynically and inaccurately) as “populist” justifications by administrators pursuing their own agendas. i assume the piece has nothing to say about the Grey Beobachter’s own key role in laundering that mode of justification.
And of course university administrators are often adept at mouthing convenient and au courant or “progressive” rhetoric to justify decisions made with other motivations. At least Oxford and Cambridge have endowed Professorships of Anglo-Saxon, which presumably means (given sufficient rigor in the local legal system, of course) that getting rid of teaching Anglo-Saxon might not save them much money because they can’t use the relevant funds for anything else. Maybe the Danish universities mentioned above did not have specifically-earmarked revenues for the teaching of Old Norse so that the kroner saved could be immediately diverted to the administration’s favored alternative instead?
> Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer and Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader
Incidentally, those are nice books. I’d think most opposition to them would be due to time pressure and how it’s graded, rather than on account of the material per se.
@JWB:
On the other hand, university administrators do not spring forth fully-formed from the brow of Zeus: they reflect the ambient political weather. Vice-Chancellors see themselves as CEOs of stockmarket titans, who should be paid orders of magnitude more than lesser employees, because They’re Worth It.
Moreover, the UK system makes all universities, including the most prestigious, extremely dependent for their financial health on central government policy, which forces increases in student numbers regardless of the resources available to teach adequately. Many have become dependent on the very much higher fees charged to foreign students, which is likely to lead to severe financial problems in the current climate of officially-sanctioned xenophobia.
The US system seems to be significantly different in many ways. US Hatters will be able to enlighten the rest of us.
For U.S. public universities, I think all the above is true as well.
When I was a schoolboy, everyone (me too) constantly joked about “benefits for people’s economy”.
That mythical thing that party officials would ask about when want to teach or research something which is not “applied”.
(basically they provided us with a useful name for the idea that it is often difficult to tell why something is “useful” even when it is and for the idea that it is not “usefulness” that motivates researchers, teachers and students do what they do)
Reminds me (slightly tangentially) of
https://xkcd.com/2655/
LOL @ mouth-pipetters.
In Austria in the last 30 years it’s been the Social Democrats who were more for letting people study whatever they want and neoliberals in the conservative party (and the xenophobic party) who make everything “relevant” to the economy or cancel it.
For example, they introduced the degree of bachelor, which hadn’t existed before, because “the economy”, whoever that is, wanted reasonably qualified people fast without having to pay them too much. A few years later, “the economy” began to whine that bachelors don’t know anything and can’t do anything, but that’s another story.
The Social Democrats tried to go neoliberal in the days of Clinton and Blair. The attempt crashed & burned. I can’t say the party has recovered, but it hasn’t tried that again.
@DE, in Russia we almost haev compulsory tertiary education.
One reason for this is that in 90s every job advertisment required “higher education” (for unqualified labour). Idon’t know why. Maybe there were too many hungry professors and they thought that professors make better employees than the working class, even when the job does not require knowledge.
The other is the army. If you’re a boy, you either study or go to the army.
Then there are also job market (for people who write programs and people who sell Chinese goods) and Soviet professional education (which prepares engineers). What to do? “Let’s do not prepare engineers, let’s teach people to sell” does NOT sound like a good idea. But if you prepare engineers, they won’t design things, they will be bosses over people who sell thigns designed and made in China. Or they will write programs (for people who sell things made in China). Students know that.
This issue is specific to Russia because of what happened to Soviet industry (similar issues elsewhere are less serious).
So everyone has a degree (which is maybe good), all universities have grown in size, education in what was called “institutes” (professional education, most of them have been renamed to universitie) is farcical because (a) people who study there are average schoolchildren – those who’re better than average choose actual universities (b) even those who can study won’t do it, if they are boys (c) they adapted their curriculum for such students. Girls do try to study, but their curriculm makes it difficult:)
Despite the idiocy of this all, I’m not sure what to do and it is not bad that everyone studies in university. (what’s bad is that they have to).
LOL @ mouth-pipetters
My dad once mouth-pipetted pure nitroglycerin. The vapors alone made him horribly sick.
@drasvi:
I see: that accounts for your rather different take on the matter.
The UK had a system when I were a lad that only a small minority of school-leavers went to university, but if you were one of the lucky minority, you didn’t need to pay the fees yourself, and you had a subsistence grant, means-tested against your parents’ income (and I happened to hit a patch when the actual size of this grant, while hardly luxurious, meant you really didn’t need to worry much about money if you were living a normal student lifestyle.) And you emerged without any debts (unless you’d been running up expenses on all your many lovers and buying too many fast cars.)
This was (mostly) changed by Tony Blair’s government, which sought to send 50% of school leavers to university. This was a Good Thing (if you google it, you’ll be presented with lots of far-right articles saying how evil it was.) Unfortunately it was combined with a neoliberal funding model that not only corrupted university administration but led to severe financial problems further down the line, and also led to the current system whereby graduates are left deeply in debt.
It’s analogous to PFIs, another ultimately ruinous dodge not actually invented by the Blair gang but greatly expanded by them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_finance_initiative
@Frans:
They are indeed nice books. But then, any Hatter would think so; and we’re talking, instead, about people who think All Grammar is Boooooring. Counter-Hatters.
Geoffrey Hill, talking of Henry Sweet, was another modern poet inspired by Old English (or at least, by the title of Sweet’s book …)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hill#Writing
@DE, I think you misunderstood me. For a number of reasons (one of them is that I occasionaly teach) “compulsion” in “compulsory education” is important for me.
I said that while in “compulsory education” it is means very literally forcing children to study, here the word is used differently. I did NOT say that here it is very literal compulsion:)
And I’m not sure that my take on the problem is so different from yours (I find your argument somewhat extreme: I think collaboration between teachers and students is more than possible, while this argument is based on “either teachers or students”).
Yes, a minority of Soviet people went to university. They did not pay, instead they were paid stipends.
That has changed: most people study in universities. I think most do not pay (and are even offered a room, or rather a bed in a room), while stipends were symbolic (like: enough for a couple bottles of beer:)) in 90s and I think are symbolic.
Note that when a university’s input is “a few geniuses”, its output will be “a few geniuses”.
And when its input is “normal schoolchildren” its output will be “normal schoolchildren”.
When most people study in university, there will be decline in quality – either this, or “weak” students will study for years what brighter ones can learn in a few months.
who make everything “relevant” to the economy
This is not, of course, what lefties mean by “relevant”; they want courses relevant to personal growth and/or the destruction of the capitalist order, depending on their personal politics. The economy will take care of itself after the revolution!
@DM, then I don’t understand the link
“students who choose subjects” -> “salaries”.
Of course, salaries can be one reason to prefer one subject to another. One out of many and hardly the most interesteing for you, for DE and for me.
I’ve never encountered that attitude. Even the actual communist parties sometimes care what is taught in a course, but saying a course shouldn’t exist doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone in Vienna or Berlin. (And Austrian student politics is real – the student parliament has real power.)
Part of the reason may be that the metaphor personal growth hasn’t made it into German, and that “self-actualization” somehow hasn’t made it into politics, even student politics as far as I noticed.
I don’t understand what you mean there…
I’ve never encountered that attitude.
It’s a specifically US thing, and I’m reacting to input from a half-century ago, so don’t take me too seriously. I’m just bitter about it.
I get the impression that US “lefties” are something rather different from European leftwingers. Probably to do with always having been excluded from political power, which no doubt leads to damaging internal developments.
Certainly leftists over this side of the Great Cultural Rift take a very considerable practical interest in here-and-now economics; a fact somewhat obscured in the UK by the wholehearted Blairite embrace of neoliberal snake-oil. The Labour party since then has not pursued any distinctively left-wing economic strategies; it has intermittently tried to limit some of the damaging effects of neoliberalism on the vulnerable, but has not seriously engaged with actual economic alternatives. But that is not because of the lack of (entirely non-revolutionary) proposals.
“Left” to most Americans seems to be synonymous with “revolutionary totalitarian Marxist”, which no doubt compounds the linguistic confusion. Separated by a common language …
And I’m not sure that my take on the problem is so different from yours
You’re probably right. We often seem to be in actual agreement once the dust settles.
I find your argument somewhat extreme: I think collaboration between teachers and students is more than possible
I am indeed a natural extremist by temperament (but someone has to do it.) But I agree that collaboration is entirely possible, and in fact would say that it is the norm, not the exception. The awkward-squad students just make more noise. And as someone rightly pointed out upthread, they are a handy stalking-horse for university administrations and governments that think that higher education is, or should be, simply a market for obtaining saleable skills.
Er.
“Communism” here DOES mean that when people are not “working” they’re busy with art and science (or something else whichis praiseworthy).
It was not called “personal growth”, but it can be described so.
(With an exception, maybe: in the Soviet image of Communism there is hardly a place for any philosophy other than the one practiced and promoted here:-)).
But we do have “personal growth” in Russian, I don’t know when it was calqued.
@DM, I commented on the word “compulsory”. DE, I think, misunderstood it as a comment on the fact of compulsion.
And he asked me, should we let students interven in the syllabus because (“on the grounds that”) they find some parts dull or unlikely to encance their salaries.
I find the idea that “salaries” is all students are interested in strange. If it is (a) not DE’s image of a student and (b) not what he thinks is my image of a student then I do not understand why he would formulate his question to me based on this weird image.
If it is what he thinks I think about students, I don’t understand why he thinks so.
In brief: why are we talking about salaries!? And what does it have to with either me or the question of students and their influence on the syllabus?
P.S. I do not expect you to explain DE’s comments to me, of course. I’m explaining why I’m confused.
drasvi, not everything is about you, and DE does not think everything is about him. He’s talking about students as a group, and he has been reading about how the mindsets of students (in the West, not Russia) have been changing. Apparently you haven’t.
LH, do you mean that students, when they have any preferences, are en masse guided by salaries?
(Maghreb is indeed full of boys who speak about salaries a lot. For a number of reasons, some of which I don’t understand, jobs are a pressing issue for Maghrebi boys. Even there I don’t preceive any shortage of Lameens and Souags: they aren’t people with narrow interests, they are people with wide interests who want a good job. And of course, everywhere people who opt for narrower professional education (which we are not talking about here) are to a large extent (and even then, among some other things, like “what they like to do”) guided by their ideas about salaries. No surprise, their desired profession too can be partly “created” by the economy)
not everything.
Yes, not everything. But this question by DE must have something to do with him, me and my comment.
Not caring too much about salaries is a luxury that’s easier for some to afford than others. If I had had to pay £10000 a year tuition for university, or knew I would have to find a job in Algeria, I wonder whether I would have had the courage/stupidity to opt for a career in linguistics. It’s less about students’ personal values than about the context they have to navigate.
Yes, I should have said that explicitly. The saddling of students with debt inevitably means that they need to think about how much their degrees can benefit them financially, no matter how committed they might be to study as an end in itself.
Of course, the saddling of students with debt is itself part of the neoliberal strategy for the commodifying of all human life. The Ayn Rand vision of the Good Life. And/or a way of keeping the Lower Orders out of higher education.
As drasvi implies, I do have a personal axe to grind. I escaped this myself, and in any case did have a career lined up which even in the UK is much more lucrative than most. But of my children, only one has degrees that you could remotely characterise as making sense to an Ayn Rand (though what he actually does for a living is entirely unconnected with his actual degree subject.)
@drasvi: Regardless of the details of your interaction with DE, the people who think students are or should be interested mostly in salaries are certain governments. For instance, the government of my state seems to think, not quite consistently, that spending taxpayers’ money on higher education is an investment that should be paid back by greater financial prosperity; no other return on the investment counts.
My experience of students as customers is a bit different – they’re quite happy and even keen to sign up for courses in a weird and wonderful variety of subjects*, but it suddenly crops up in demands for pass marks (or 1st marks)… not usually for doing nothing at all, but for going through the motions – performing a task, rather than producing an outcome. They’ve paid for the class, they’ve done the thing, so how can they have lost marks?
Not large numbers, actually, but a vociferous minority. (And some of the others might just be people who get 2:1 marks by going through the motions and are happy enough with that.)
I don’t know if those students are worrying about salaries – I suspect they still expect to get the salary they want for whatever THEY decide they want to do.
The main pressure on programme content as I understand it comes from large employers (i.e. party donors) who want their employees to be trained at the government’s expense rather than their own, so resent the teaching of anything not directly relevant to their needs.
Which is not to say that anyone else is wrong. We all see our own bits.
*Of course, if you offered 500 students a choice of 10 courses, you’d end up with 150 students on 3 of them and <10 on the other 7 – but it's very important to them to get to behave exactly like everyone else out of choice and not compulsion. Which is hardly restricted to students, after all.
One of my offspring opted not to take a course they were actually quite keen on, after finding out from older undergraduates that it was (a) much harder work than most of the parallel options and (b) hardly anyone, no matter how industrious, got a first in it. (Happily, they ended up getting really interested in the option they did take.) Given that most Brits have been taught to be hopeless at foreign languages, and that Old English pretty much is a foreign language, a similar calculation may well underlie the horror of many Eng Lit students at the thought of having to take OE.
Fortunately, such complex decisionmaking was not called for in my own case. For reasons best known to themselves, the powers that be felt that it was not appropriate to give students the option of dropping the sessions on the anatomy of the leg, for example, no matter how tedious they might be.
My colleague who is responsible for the medical students’ curriculum was faced a few years ago with demands from the students for teaching on microaggressions. He was proposing to rope me in to this at one point, but happily, nothing came of it. Or he thought better of it …
https://thenewinquiry.com/against-students/
Apropos. Thanks, rozele.
I should (partly in the light of that timely warning) perhaps point out that most current UK medical students are not “white British” in the sense that what Private Eye calls the “former newspaper” The Daily Telegraph has lately taken to using the term*, and do indeed regularly experience not only microagressions but, especially now, often pretty stark macroaggressions too. (On discrimination in career progression, there is a classic and objectively incontrovertable paper, published in the BMJ some years ago. I am glad to say that the BMA, not always a model trade union, is all over this issue, at least.)
* Neither is my mother, so I am presumably a Mischling. However, racist patients (and medical staff) do not perceive the taint in my blood, for some reason. Unaccountable …
The high rate of Telegraph-disapproved medical (and law) students in the UK is probably driven by the fact that successful immigrants even now still dream of their children going into the old-timey respectable professions (even when they aren’t doctors or lawyers themselves.)
@de
I am amazed that medical students require instruction in how to carry out acts of microaggression. Already in primary school, there was a high standard among my fellow pupils, and the more advanced among them formed small groups where they not only perfected their skill at microaggression, but were able to go on to macroaggression, a subject taken up by the slower pupils only in secondary school and with extreme reluctance.
@Lameen, yes. In 2011 I read about the Arab revolutions in Russian and English, everyone wrote about jobs.
(In Russia something have changed: namely Russians were told that Arab revolutions are work of evil manipulators by means of Facebook and Twitter, know for sure WHY those revolutions happened and look at me (I don’t know why they happened:)) as an idiot, either unbelievably naïve or poorly informed, but at first propaganda was indifferent to them).
When I was able to talk with Arabic speakers I noticed that they do talk about jobs and, moreover, the necessity of finding a good job is significant emotionally (that is, makes many unhappy). I think more for boys than for girls (but can’t be sure I think so based on observation and not the theory that girls are more dependent). I think this is a function of the context, not the culture, but can’t say I understand this context.
It is easy not to love money for people in my Russian circle. The reasons:
1. Russians “emigrate” to Moscow. Muscovites don’t feel they need to emigrate anywhere. I’m not talking about the war here, I mean “opportunities” (economic and others). Even when your interests have a lot to do with other countries, you feel that it’s good to have a base in Moscow.
And it is very important whether you have a flat here or not. Renting even a small one is well above what many people (in Moscow too) earn.
2. those of my friends who’re “good at math” can easily fidn a good job. Anywhere. And importantly they know that their children will fidn a job anywhere with ease.
Others have friends.
3. Peer pressure, we don’t have it. Some of (very similar) people you know are poor, some are rich.
What this means, you don’t have to hurry. You can be poor this year because you don’t want to earn money and rich another year because you want to earn them. But of course children change a lot here.
@PP:
It is certainly the case that the reason that the term “bedside manner” exists is because possession of a good bedside manner is, um, not universal among medical staff.
(This, too, is something that is actively addressed in current UK medical education, though I’m not sure to what extent such things can be formally taught. I suspect much of the trouble arises from the fact that you need to be a hardcore Ghastly Swot even to have a chance of getting into medical school at all, in these Latter Days of the Law.)
@DE, you reminded me how I and my ex-wife attended a course in some advanced subject in math logic, without any knowledge of math logic to speak about, with a lecturer who’s the worst speaker I ever met. In the second month of the course two people attended his lectures, my wife and me. In the third month it was one student (not me). But I think she didn’t take the exam even though she wanted to.
But in this specific university people study because they want math, not because they want the degree (and their degrees are recognised by mathematicians and no one else: good for a career in pure math, useless otherwise).
There is a vivid description in Solzhenitsyn’s В круге первом of a maths professor whose teaching style consisted of muttering near-inaudibly while facing the blackboard and writing; two of his students cooperated in transcribing what he said between them and discovered that he was conveying brilliant mathematical insights.
How common (or realistic) that is, I cannot say, though I can certainly testify that some truly brilliant scientists are really dreadful lecturers. One might think that different skill sets were involved …
Stephen Hawking lectured that way, when he was still barely able to talk, and was understood only by his experienced assistants, who would live-interpret.
my lovely high-school physics teacher was in that mode, though generally loud enough to be audible – however, he had a tendency to switch from english to french when things got complex (which was fine, because there were students fluent enough to interpret), and to drift into german (the language of his higher education) when he got wrapped up in an explanation, though i never heard him get all the way to his cradle-tongue, which was farsi.
One reason the course is memorable is that the lecturer is a super-human.
He inserts thoughs, meta-comments and parenthetical notes into other thouhgs generously enough for them to be occasionaly (mostly not) nested.
This is the confusing part: when knowledge of math logic is required but you come to deal with your ignorance of it by immersion (afraid that other students will frown upon you even thoguh they won’t, of course – people don’t do it there) it is difficult to follow.
But what makes him a super-human is the ability to insert a comment exactly where it occured to him, between any pair of words or into a word (!). Gluing it to the first half of the word when it’s a word (rarely).
And then continue: the word, its intonation, the thought.
Once I transcribed a chunk and was fascinated. First I found that I seriously understimated the amount of this, second it looked like the result of repeated random application of select-cut-move the cursor-paste to a text in a text editor.
I don’t remember if such inserts could overlap (Abcdef. Ghijkl! > AbcGhidef. jkl!)
However, reading Meillet’s grammar of IE when I was 16 and knew nothing about linguistics was more difficult:)
Not because the thoughts there are too complex. But
– what, for example, should I do with thousands of examples from many languages? Should read each, or what I need is the ideas they illustrate?
(As an adult, I don’t know. It is not that we want to know IE or some specific detail about it. We do, to the extent I want to know, say, any deatil about Akkadian. The more interesting question has a lot to do with the examples: “how much we can learn from them about IE?” So a student needs examples and a plenty of them. But-1: she needs really, really, really many of them (and she needs years). But-2: books do not tell how we transform them into a reconstruction, instead they describe the reconstruction)
– “thematic” contrasted to “athematic” and also “thematic vowel”. Terms used frequently whose meaning I was not able to guess.
“Thematic” means “with a thematic vowel”, and “thematic vowel” means “*e/*o at the end of the stem”.
The terminology is also familiar to students of Classical Greek verb conjugation; it just occurred to me that I don’t know whether the Indo-Europeanists borrowed it from Greek scholarship or vice versa.
In the U.S. system where one does not even start law school or medical school until after receiving a bachelor’s degree in Something Else, students already intent on those pathways have at least in theory the luxury of choosing an arbitrarily impractical-seeming Something Else without any signfiicant risk of negative impact on subsequent earnings. It would not surprise me if fewer do so than was the case X decades ago, but I haven’t seen good data on that and would be delighted to be wrong about that. One recent example of that phenomenon would be a current first-year law student (who happens to be my daughter) who received her bachelor’s degree in what that university calls Classical & Mediterranean Studies (the latter adjective intended to encompass e.g. the guy who does Syriac who does not have an alternative departmental home within the arts & sciences faculty*). Another slightly less recent one would be the physician who performed a minor surgical procedure on my other daughter, who went to med school after receiving a bachelor’s degree in archeology. (While also presumably getting good grades in organic chemistry and a few other pre-med things like that not necessarily compulsory for archeology majors as such.)
*He does also have an appointment or at least job title in the Div School, but for various bureaucratic and/or financial reasons I imagine that’s not sufficient under the circumstances.
@David Eddyshaw
Commodifying all of human life is not what Ayn Rand’s philosophy is about. Human life can’t be commodified precisely because of human selfishness. How could we commodify deeply selfish desires like motherly love for instance?
It’s hilarious that people (leftists) think Ayn Rand’s ethics are some sort of singular evil and abomination. Her ethical views aren’t really any different to what Aristotle says in the Nicomachean ethics. But maybe you prefer Babylonian ethics like our friends in the Middle East? Maybe you prefer the ethics of Tiberius and Nero like our friends in Latin America? We who love the West prefer the ethics of those acquisitive and inquisitive seafarers who created the likes of Naucratis, Alexandria and Antioch. This is the road to true splendor.
And if you don’t like ‘neoliberalism’ (which means nothing and is a basically a leftist code word for an economy based on Western ethics i.e. a normal Western market economy aka capitalism) do us a favor and go to Cuba or something.
Knock it off, CJ. I’ve already warned you about personal attacks and political rants. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all, as my dear departed mother used to say.
That’s exaggerated.
“Neoliberalism[1] is a political and economic ideology that advocates for free-market capitalism, which became dominant in policy-making from the late 20th century onward.[2][3][4] The term has multiple, competing definitions, and is most often used pejoratively.[5][6] In scholarly use, the term is often left undefined or used to describe a multitude of phenomena.[7][8][9] However, it is primarily employed to delineate the societal transformation resulting from market-based reforms.[10]”
Wikipedia again, on the latter:
“Aristotle asserts that there is one highest good—eudaimonia (traditionally translated as “happiness” or “flourishing”)—which is what good politics should target, because what is best for an individual is less beautiful (kalos) and divine (theios) than what is good for a people (ethnos) or community (polis).”
That’s a rather fundamental difference to outright denying the existence of society and proclaiming what’s best for an individual to be the only thing that individual should strive for, isn’t it?
It looks like Aristotle wasn’t a sociopath and couldn’t achieve eudaimonia while watching people suffer.
If I’m asking CJ to avoid arguing politics, it’s only fair to ask everyone else not to argue with his arguments. Let’s just let it drop.
I bought a bottle (plastic) of kvas and did not drink it out.
It exploded spectacularly: the world goes black, one of your ears can’t hear, kvas is raining on your head and your cat is in a different corner of your room than he was a millisecond ago.
Ah, and your tea tastes like kvas.
I’m glad the lasting impression is that of the slapstick side of it!
Yes, (if my cat agrees, of course. Not sure I would if I were in his… er. Virtual boots). I understand what happened: I’m too used to bottled drinks where the pressure is constant as long as you don’t shake them. Not those where it keeps rising each hour and day. I’m surprised that it is so similar to “serious” explosions to shock you, and pleased that it’s different enought to be funny. It is some two meters from me, but two liters were enough to flood the entire room and feel like an actual rain (seriosly, can’t think about enything else: the rain does feel so, but it does not smell kvas).
@Davidzz*, thanx!
*the sound of Arabo-Italian a bezzaffe:-E
I didn’t know it comes from Greek grammar, that explains a lot. Something. Not everything.
One thing I found confusing when I was 16 is that there is more than one place where e and o alternate in IE.
The grades of ablaut. This formant (named by DM).
At first I thought that e and o, when they alternate, are always ablaut grades, and the question was “what is that surely important fact about the ablaut grades ‘thematic’ is here to convey”.
When I understood that IE also has this formant, my question changed to “does ‘thematic’ refers to all alternations of e and o (an uninformative epithet) or it is meant to specify which of the alternations we’re speaking about (and is informative)?”.
What I find objectively confusing:
– to do the job of explaining and specifying, ‘thematic’ and ‘theme’ in ‘thematic vowel‘ must have a meaning independent of this vowel.
– when ‘thematic’ is said about a word and means ‘one with the thematic vowel’ it’s meaning IS dependent on this vowel. IF ‘thematic’ in ‘thematic vowel’ has same meaning, that would mean ‘thematic vowel’ means…. “vowel with this vowel”. Or “vowel which is this vowel”.
This of course made it more difficult to guess the meaning from context.
When I learned that ‘theme’ means “stem” (not from Meillet) I was also confused by ‘athematic’. A stem without a stem?!
___
The funny thing is that when I read my first page in French (explanations of Breton grammar), without a dictionary and any knowdge of French I was not able to understand from context one (1) word. “Le mot“.
When I decided not to use French-to Russian dictionaries and used Le petit Larousse, I was not able to understand from context one (1) word. “On”
And in Meillet I was nto able to udnerstand one (1) word which annoyed me a lot, because it is repeated very often.
Does every French text has such a word !?
@LH, when CJ and DM were arguing with each other in Weird Minds I thought that one neat solution would be:
“they continue their argument in that thread, BUT CJ does not post such comments [such: not about linguistics and disagreable for most people here] elsewhere”.
I did not read their exchange. I’m not interested. The reason I found it valuable is that both perceptibly enjoy it. However I understand that you don’t want CJ to post anything anywhere. I metion this idea, but it is not a “request”, of course (and can’t be a request, because I don’t think I would read their exchange).
@Jerry, my interaction with DE revolved around the question of who (students, professors) and how should decide upon the contents of the syllabus, so it is reasonable to ask what do actual students want and based on what they prefer certain subjects.
And thinking of this, to want a subject it must be either 1. interesting or 2. give you access to something (groups of people, opportunities, careers, salaries…) or 3. make you a better or more productive specialist.
Else nothing is good about it.
I think “salaries” stand for 2 here and perhaps DE meant that students prioritise 2 over 3 but 3 too can be described as “salaries”.
The other question than is based on what professors want students to study whatever they want them to study. 1 2 3, and anythin else?
Except that no one around me maximises her salary. Each of my female freinds could work as a prostitute when they were 20 and that’s not even “maximising”: you won’t earn billions this way.
(I do think that if they – many girls around me are algebraists – honestly approached the qeustion of earning millions or billions as a problem to be solved and honestly worked as hard as they could, they would be millionaries or billionaries. I think same about most people here)
We maximise something entirely different. When (very often) we study something not because we like it, but because we are interested in a specific career, what makes this career attractive is often not the salary.
Also is the Soviet system really exotic?
I mean
– universites that prepare “mathematicians”, “philologists” etc.
– institutes that prepare professionals.
It is understood that:
– what a good “math” or “philology” student is taught in a univerisity is enough for a career in science. If that’s what she wants.
– that most of them won’t be researchers.
– they won’t use most of what they learn in university
“I don’t want this course about Buile Suibne, I want to study Berber songs, they will give me access to lucrative jobs” sounds ridiculous. Same for various branches of mathematics stednts specialise in the university.
“Buile Suibne” – a series of some 500 seminars ran at the philological faculty of MSU in 90s. I rememer nothing* and at first understood nothing but was fun.
*Other than that if you’re ge(i)lt you have feathers, walk naked and can leap far.
We maximise something entirely different. When (very often) we study something not because we like it, but because we are interested in a specific career, what makes this career attractive is often not the salary.
Yes, I think that’s true of most of us here. If it were true of everyone, the world would be a better place…
that if you’re ge(i)lt you have feathers, walk naked and can leap far
Derives from Kusaal gɛl “egg.” Etymology recapitulates ontogeny.
The moral of Buile Suibne is “never cross a scary Irish saint.” I think we can all get behind that.
I don’t, mostly. I simply have SIWOTI syndrome – a sense that I’m in public and have a certain responsibility for what I let stand uncontradicted.
This mysterious stem-forming suffix* undergoes ablaut just like most other morphemes.
* Probably (can’t find the paper right now) forming nouns from verb roots, until it was kept in denominative verbs in Proto-Indo-Tocharian and “simple thematic verbs” became extremely productive in Proto-Indo-Actually-European.
@DM, to be precise: I felt you’re enjoying it (or are enthusiastic) in that thread.
In this thread I feel you’re tired.
(which is not to say my feelings about your feelings mean anything when you know your actual feelings:))
Suibne Geilt memorably appears as a character in At Swim-Two-Birds, because of course he does. Making bids at poker in Irish quatrains.
DE, yes, they’re scarier than poets.
Boringly dismal-science labor economics does not claim that any individuals try to maximize their income-as-such; it claims they try to maximize their utility, with a range of individual subjective variation in how people will make the optimal-for-them tradeoffs between the incremental utility of more money v. more enjoyable working conditions v. more subjective satisfaction about the meaning or value of the work v. more leisure time etc. And sometimes the “trade-offs” are more complicated as when working more intensely for more hours means more extra money to do expensive-but-enjoyable stuff in ones lessened leisure time, etc.
Obviously it may the case that The System (via the education system or otherwise) wants you to be maximally “productive” or something like that rather than maximize your own utility in light of your own subjective preferences, but that’s a different issue.
@LH, I think for everyone.
The idea of a human being investing all the power of her mind in finding the most efficient way of performing a task (here the task is “money-making”, but can be anything) and all the power of her body in realisation of the plan is rather horrifying. That’s a machine, not a human being.
(And perhaps that is even impossible: soving such problems requires creativity, a machine can’t do that)
We find such characters in some genres of fiction (e.g. martial arts), but not in the reality.
However, I think the idea that “humans maximise profits” precisely means humans are such machines.
Yes, you can, for example, when you’re lazy or disgusted by doing something “profitable”, pretend that you are “incapable” of doing it. People even do think so. People think that a jobless Tunisian boy – or worse, a waitress working in a traditional eatery in Tunis and wearing a headscarf – is “incapable” of learning to write programs (and to do it well) – which would allow him find a good job anywhere.
In reality he does not do it because… no one among his freinds does it. And being “good at math” tells more about your interests than capabiities.
Yes, you can, for example, say “no, of course, we are not talking about prostitution! We are talking about Normal Jobs”.
But by such reservations you pile up human traits. Instead of that hypothetical machine you have a human whose various ideas and multiple preferences you call “inability” or “not what we are talking about” and so on. Which is deception.
But yes, people do want money:)
Practically, yes, I can say that many of those of my friends who’re “good at math” are programmers.
And… yes, it is a good profession in terms of salaries.
Even then there are two buts:
1. there are many “good professions in terms of salaries”. But programming offers you mobility.
Say, a certain guy moved from Moscow to Yerevan in 2022 (because he does not want to go to the war). A half a year he works from (not “in”) Yerevan and complains at chastity of local girls. A half a year he works from Thailand where he has a girlfriend. It is not “emigration”, it is flying around Russia as they’re fighting the stupid war. I’m not sure he even changed the employer (I think it used to be Yandex in Moscow and many of their male employees are working from Yerevan).
With a “normal” (more traditional) profession he would be at first a jobless man in the poor country of Armenia, then he would apply for a visa to a richier country, then he would be working there, but earning less, then he would find a local employer interested in his skills and that would be what you imagine as “emigration”.
2. it is maybe the Best profession (in terms of salaries)… among those my freinds have. (One of them is a millionaire, but perhaps he has an unusual talent, I’m not sure if others can repeat his feat)
There are many professions where salaries are much higher. My friends are not interested in such careers (see above about the jobless Tunisian boy (which is not to say I couldn’t take a Russian example, most Russians too don’t write programs)).
I mean, maybe when you’re talking about economy you can do it. Depending on what you want to understand about the economy, analyse salaries but not preferences.
Or you can express preferences in terms of money. But when we’re talking about preferences, we don’t need to do that:/ We don’t need to “translate” everything to the language convenient to economists.
The WP article on IE thematic vowels notes, only half-helpfully, “Not to be confused with the homonymous term thematic vowel used in grammars of Elamite and Hurrian, which works completely differently than the Indo-European thematic vowel.”
There was a tradition in the descriptive linguistics of North American languages, of using the terms theme and thematic. It may have started with Sapir. The terms are not defined formally anywhere that I know. Impressionistically, I think the themes is a unit somewhere between a stem and a full word, and there may be different mechanisms of derivation of themes from stems than of stems from roots (i.e. it’s not just a matter of an arbitrary boundary within an agglutinative sequence). Thematic refers to some affix which determines the details of the inflection of the full word, as in Latin conjugation and declension classes.
I haven’t looked into the issue in detail. The impressions above may be wrong. Someone should write a paper on it, and I hope that won’t be me.
One of those muddled articles that needs an overhaul…
Iranica, Elamite: “Stems may be derived by the thematic vowels –a, –u, –i. Of these, –i marks both nouns and homophonous noun-verbs…”
“Noun-verb” – a nice name for a POS in an extraterrestrial language.
The adjective “thematic” also turns up in other linguistics jargon which has nothing to do with thematic verbs, as a helpful warning in this short piece notes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_role
By the way:
“Philological approach” above and also “literary” contrasted to “philological” in DE’s comment are curiously different from how “philology” is understood in Russia.
More or less:
The range from literary criticism to linguistics, anything dealing with texts. However, linguists call what they do “linguistics”, and perhpas some people aren’t confident that linguistics is a part of philology, but I don’t think anyone would question the status of literary studies.
I think I don’t understand what this “philological approach” means:)
The current usage of “philological” in linguistics, as I am familiar with it, refers to the analysis of older written language documentation, such as early fieldnotes or missionary grammars.
@LH, DE, you know, yes, strange.
I don’t understand what ideal of education the quoted authors have in mind. What I said about Soviet (and ideally Russian) universities, that they prepare researchers but it is understood that most students won’t work as researchers is repeated.
But I think here everyone is quite satisfied:/ It is not that we don’t love “salaries”. We do!
But students at the math faculty are totally happy to study pure math and not, God forbid, applied math (there are interesting problems in applied mathematics, but courses so called are going to be boring) – that is why they go there in the first place!
Students at the philological factulty are similarly happy with Buile Suibne or whatever and that is why… etc.
Employers are happy too. It is difficult to say what makes people with ‘prestigeous’* diplomas attractive: is it because brightest children go to study there or do they really learn something useful?
But employers are expected to expect such people to perform better at jobs very vaguely connected to mathematics or philology. Say, a person who studied math is expected to be a better math teacher than a person who studied “teaching math”. Not all such people are good teachers, some are good at math and bad at teaching. And not all people who studied teaching math are good teachers, some are bad at math and bad at teaching
and others are bad at math but good at teaching.* Actually, “prestige” of your degree does not really play a large role in Russia. But more prestigeous is better rather than worse than less prestigeous even when it is not too important and MSU is ‘more prestigeous’.
@Y, wow. I never came across it!
I mean, no one here has a reason to grumble at this system practiced by universities.
No one among most vulgar and money-loving people too.
Perhaps someone could say: universities suck brightest children out of Russian schools and teach total madness to them instead of [worthy things]. But no one says that.
philological
The book was first published in 1953, drasvi. It’s an old-fashioned usage. If it had been more recent, Quirk would probably have said “linguistically inclined.” Tolkien often used “philology” like this, too. And “comparative philology” was formerly common for “comparative linguistics.”
“Athematic” is also used as a term of art in Romani linguistics, as a handy label for the morphology of the non-Indic component, which is partly modelled on (Byzantine) Greek.
http://web.ff.cuni.cz/ustavy/ulug/lingvistika/elsik/veda/Elsik_2000_Paradigms.pdf
Matras now uses “xenoclitic” instead, which is certainly less confusing. (I can never remember, without looking it up, which of the Indic and non-Indic layers is “thematic” and which is “athematic.”)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_language#Xenoclitic
I can even confirm. Yes, madness, magic and Breton.
@DE, I understand about the date, but it is nevertheless very different from the Russian usage.
And I understand about ‘lignuistically inclined’ but as I understand certain approaches to work with texts (rather than language) also go there. Not sure which ones….
The google books ngram viewer shows a quite steep decline in frequency of use of “philological” from around 1875 to around 1920, then a fairly steady rate for most of the rest of the 20th century before beginning to increase again. But I suspect that as the word became more marginal, different subcultures preserved it for different fragments of its once-vast semantic domain, getting somewhat out of step with each other in the process. Earlier this summer I got a few chapters into James Turner’s _Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities_ before getting distracted, but I hope to pick it up again soon.
In Russia, if you’re a girl you go study “philology”. If you’re a boy you go study engineering or something like that.
Or it used to be so. Not the reality (to a large extent the reality too) but how people imagine it.
I know we’ve talked about constructions with wants + past participle in the Midwest. I couldn’t quickly find any of those discussions, so I’ll post here.
In a meeting today, an Ohioan described something by saying it “needs discussed”. It’s a pretty natural extension of wants-plus, but I can’t remember hearing it with needs before.
@ryan
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midland_American_English
–reformatted slightly
“Need + participle”: Many speakers use the construction “need + past participle”. Some examples include:
– The car needs washed to mean the car needs to be washed
-They need repaired to mean they need to be repaired
– So much still needs said to mean so much still needs to be said
To a lesser degree, a small number of other verbs have been reportedly used in this way too, such as The baby likes cuddled or She wants prepared.[17] As seen in these examples, it is also acceptable to use this construction with the words want and like.[27]
—
“Noun-verb” – a nice name for a POS in an extraterrestrial language.
Now I want to read the story; somebody write it!
Also on the “needs VERBed” construction: https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/needs-washed
We have, of course, discussed “philology”; e.g. 2009, 2022
@drasvi: how “philology” is understood in Russia.
As E. M. Lifshitz wrote about the great Soviet physicist L. D. Landau,
Landau and Lifshitz, Mechanics, Third Edition, translated by J. B. Sykes and J. S. Bell, p..xvi
I’m not saying that all Russians understand it that way.
A Russian joke, often ascribed to Landau, goes like “the sciences [understood as “fields of study” like in German Wissenschaft] are divided into natural, non-natural, and unnatural”.
Again, I note that math can belong to humanities:)
Perhaps some folks from “natural” sciences, who are precise, very precise, but never as precise as mathematicians have developed inferiority complex and need to remind everyone how they are more precise than philologists? Like, you know, people engaged in upwards social mobility can look down upon villagers (though that is not inferiority complex, it is something else*).
* For one thing you won’t move upwards or anywhere if you like where you are, for the other if you’re working hard on not being like X it is not surprising that you frown upon shameless and satisfied X. And for the third, saying to a child “don’t be like X” is both at once: encouragement of upwards movement and a disparaging remark about X.
@Jerry, I know “zoology” as a metaphor for… hm. A branch of a science, unappealing because most of what people do there is catalogising objects. When on LH I heard people speak of “butterfly collecting” (http://lughat.blogspot.com/2017/10/butterfly-collecting-history-of-insult.html) I recognised “zoology”.
Same metaphor, but more hostile (you don’t have to think that catalogising is “bad” but it you may prefer to work on something else).
And perhaps ambiguous.
A plenty of linguists actually collect forms or structures.
And I as I’m writing this (and Lameen in his blog) have ‘collected’ this one metaphor in my mind.
On the other hand, when you work with a language or a country or a religion, it can be said that the field as a whole is ‘collecting’ descriptions of languages or cultures or histories or religions, but your (personal) work is exploration or analysis of one language or country or religion which is a whole world for you.
Continuing the metaphor, it can be said that the humanity is a stupid collection of humans. Without a slightest hint on the Explanatory Theory of the human. But one human does not collect humans. She instead is a freind to some of them and falls in love with them.
___
Anyway, what I wanted to tell: “philology” and “zoology” are similar in form.
Both time a name of respectable science is used as a lable of something undesirable.
“Zoology” and “butterfly collecting” are less similar in form but have same referent.
Fundamentally, the “butterfly collecting” comment exposes an ignorance of the intellectual effort required for fieldwork and linguistic description, and a contempt for it.
While a proper zoologist might work on deducing the evolutionary processes that shaped the wings of a kiwi, a theoretical zoologist in the mold of the theoretical linguists would write a work on whether or not a kiwi’s wing really is a wing, since previous work has defined wing as having the feature [+FLIGHT]; or maybe it’s a ∅-wing?
I think, there are two different and almost independent things being mixed up. Some Wissenschaften are inclined more toward description, documentation, classification, etc. as opposed to finding explanations. And a different direction is the degree of rigor which is required (or is currently attainable) either in “collection” or “explanation”. AFAIK (not much!) professional historians have very high standards as to what they consider as known and in general are very conscientious about the uncertainties and limitations of historical knowledge. And also they seem to reject attempts at generalizations and explanations as a matter of course.
on whether or not a kiwi’s wing really is a wing
And a marine biologist in the same theoretical mould would write on penguins, and redefine [+FLIGHT] to include both aerial and aquatic.
Made curious about the history of “butterfly collect[ing]” as a pejorative metaphor, I googled up an interesting discussion only to realize it was the one drasvi had recently linked to ….
Although it also reminded me of this rather nasty/bitter/pejorative song by an erstwhile butterfly-in-the-metaphor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1eGLbLHt3A
“And I don’t care about morals
Cause the world’s insane
And we’re all to blame anyway
And I don’t feel any sorrow
Towards the kings and queens
Of the butterfly collectors”
CAPTAIN: YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DOING.
CAPTAIN: FOR GREAT JUSTICE.
>i>Perhaps some folks from “natural” sciences, who are precise, very precise, but never as precise as mathematicians have developed inferiority complex and need to remind everyone how they are more precise than philologists?
An ingenious theory (if we change “precise” to “rigorous”), but lacking evidence.
On the subject of “collecting”, there’s also one ascribed to Rutherford. According to the Quote Investigator, the earliest version is from the physicist John Desmond Bernal in 1939: “Rutherford used to divide science into physics and stamp collecting, but if the analogy were to be carried through, it would be reduced to ‘gadgeteering’ and stamp collecting.”
https://www.neatorama.com/images/2008-12/mad-scientist-mad-engineers.jpg
“Just” is particularly good.
@Y, I would not describe the quote from David DeCamp (in Lameen’s post) as contemptuous.
He says it’s a stage.
I even believe that one problem of sceince and any human enterprises driven by creativity and curiousity is that people accustomed to a (productive) approach or idea keep practicing it and even belive that this approach is what their enterprise is all about. They do not try to come up with other ideas and forget that the enterprise is about creativity. Linguistis specifically seem to fear “explanations” (as result of silly theories which they happily invented in the 19th century), fear is not a good thing.
So I agree that when everyone describes things and no one tries to explain anything, people should be reminded that explaining is a thing. But for me it is one thing out of many humans do. If so, let’s do it. Too.
I don’t understand his “stages” or the word “true”.
“True linguistics is descriptive! Theories are fantasies” “No, True science is Explanatory Theories”
I’d forgotten about DeCamp and about Lameen’s post. I was thinking about Chomsky’s quote.
It’s ultimately a perfectly artificial false dichotomy, of course. You need some kind of theory before you start linguistic butterfly-collecting at all, or you’ll hear nothing but noise and see nothing but squiggles; and a theory based only on a tame collection of pet data is just a kind of party game, and no kind of science at all.
Of theories based on introspection in the comfort of one’s study we do not speak. Perhaps some of them are pleasing as artistic artefacts, if your taste leans toward abstract art.
@de
I am not sure about this, children recognise and learn to replicate structures without any theory except “what I hear has meaning and can be broken down into morphemes”. What I wpuld agree with is that to produce a descriptive grammar, you need to have a theory about desscriptive grammars. But maybe that is what you meant.
Of theories based on introspection in the comfort of one’s study we do not speak.
But I was thinking of a plan
To dye one’s whiskers green,
And always use so large a fan
That they could not be seen.
without any theory except
“Except.” Aye, there’s the rub.
Actually, even segmenting speech into phonemes involves a theory, let alone hypothesising the existence of morphemes. I think the very lowest-level parts of the specific theory are part of our genetic heritage, but that just means that the theory is incorporated into the hardware rather than in the software, not that it isn’t a theory at all.
But by far the most of language learning involves our general human capacity for generalisation and abstraction: and abstraction is theory-building. But there, I’m just agreeing with your point.
I was thinking more of linguistic grammar-writing, though.
A good plan.
There is some forum of mostly Western (but partly maybe local too) wives in Saudi Arabia. Some stories they shared were quite interesting but I can’t find it:( The link from Google that led me there led specifically to a thread “what do you wear under abaya?”. It was less interesting (silly people don’t put anything Truly Interesting under their robes) but there is, of course, something about the interplay between the idea of a robe and various norms of keeping one’s body modestly dressed, clean, combed and not too strange (as green moustache), of looking and being so. I don’t know if под одеждой все голые “under clothes everyone [is] naked” is idiomatic in English, but it refers to this “something” too.
@DE, DeCamp’s quote contrasts “the weakest theory” (knowing the output for a given input of a black box) with “the stronger claim of describing what is actually in the black box”.
All of this has curious parallells. E.g. the idea of being “predictive” – for him it is “weak”.
And what is “actually”?
XKCD on stamp collecting.
@DE, people read, deaf people sign and read. Of course, texts too are sequences of discrete signs. Moreover, all writing systems we use can be learned and used by an adult without too much difficulty: people will not use or maybe will not even invent a system that can’t be used. But I can’t be sure that babies rely on a speech processor that knows what’s phonology.
@drasvi:
DeCamp’s stuff about “black boxes” is just tendentious rhetoric. How does he imagine that “black boxes” ever get opened? By the exercise of pure imagination? By making your hypothesis more elaborate? This is not what happened with the explanation of genetics through DNA and RNA, which he disingenuously pretends is a parallel to Chomskyan investigation by introspection, which has nothing at all to say about what he calls “structure.” No amount of such mental self-abuse will ever tell you what’s inside the black box. On the contrary, it will discourage actual research by suggesting that the topic is already resolved, when it isn’t at all.
His idea that, first you collect your data (presumably “blind” to any theory) and then (and only then) deduce a “theory” from it, is a childish caricature of actual scientific methodology.
I posted the appropriate Darwin quote in Lameen’s thread.
I am pretty sure that the idea of looking at the language black box really hard was inspired in part by the well-publicized successes of particle physics at the time Chomsky started his journey. Things like deducing the neutrino before ever detecting one.
But particles are black boxes. You can’t “look” inside one.
It’s more like: you invent a mathematically elegant theory and either make spectactual predictions about the input and output or not. If you succeed in making them, you’re a hero:)
texts too are sequences of discrete signs
Signed languages also have phoneme analogues; the major difference is that they can appear in parallel as well as sequentially, but that doesn’t alter the fact that, like the phonemes of spoken languages, they are abstractions.
But: the segmentation of speech into phones (even before you start on phonemes) is much more complex than people (at least, people other than Hatters) realise. Consonants and vowels bleed into one another temporally, and people regularly hear sounds where there is nothing to see in the sound traces. There is a lot of preprocessing before you ever get to phonemes.
Apart from the sheer complexity, I believe that there are analogues to this in other animals; hence the notion that there is a genetic basis to this very low-level stuff. I’m not at all averse ideologically to the idea that it’s all the general human Power of
LoveAbstraction, but it seems a stretch.Just because Chomsky is almost completely wrong about Language and genetics, it doesn’t necessarily make him totally wrong.
I once fell asleep when listening to a (cycled) paragraph of my friend’s short story, in Arabic, read by the author.
I listened to it as a pronunciation exercise.
When I woke up, I heard (with some shock) that in two places my freind switches to pure Russian (nonsensical, but wihtout phonetical imperfections). I focused and in the second or third repetition (I remind that it was cycled) with some effort (!) was able to hear the underlying Arabic, and for a minute or two or three, as my mind was waking up further, I could hear both the underlying Arabic and Russian. By choice:)
Strangely, the Arabic does not even seem too much similar to what I heard.
But: the segmentation of speech into phones (even before you start on phonemes) is much more complex than people (at least, people other than Hatters) realise.
Yes, Mark Liberman has posted a lot of very enlightening material on that topic over at the Log.
@PP, about “need [to be]”:
It’s of course a shock for someone who mostly deals with written English or spoken L2 English to hear that in normal native speech instead of those (horrifying for learners) chains of auxiliaries (like “to have been”) you hear a vague weak “ʰa”. Or rather I hear “ʰa”, I think L1 speakers hear more:)
Is this “to be” also weak?
If so I’m not terribly surprised if a baby decides not to acquire something which is weak both phonetically and (unlike “have been”) semantically… Like, why should I half-say it when it does not change the meaning?
I’d say [təvbɪn] for “to have been.” Only after a consonant would I have [ə] for “have”, and even there I think I usually say [əv].
[əv] for “have” is standard, of course. In the UK it sometimes gets restressed as [ɔv], by analogy with “of.” “I might of done that.” US too, I think.
I don’t think “have” is ever weak semantically in standard English, including as a auxiliary: the complicated English tense/aspect system doesn’t get simplified in speech. It’s not a literary-style thing.
So I don’t think “needs washed” is due to any phonological or semantic weakness of “to be.” I say this myself (on Tuesdays and Thursdays, anyway), and my wife uses the construction regularly, even when she is speaking SLOWLY AND DISTINCTLY to her husband.
I said that this “to be” is semantically weak unlike “have been”!
As for “have”, either I misrembered (I haven’t listened to native English for years) and it was not “to have been” but something else, or the problem is my Russian ears.
What I remember is that I’m able to hear an [æ] and maybe a trace of [h] and realise that in reality there is a whole chain there:)
And “weak” here describes the quality of your voice: the chain is said fast and quietly (except maybe [æ]), so I expect natives to hear more sounds there.
“I say this myself” – yes, I mean how it could have arisen.
I mean,
step 1. everyone always says “need to be”
step 2. some say “need”, others pick it from them
How and why the transition happened? There must be a reason. And the reason can be either semantical or phonetical or grammatical (syntactical). So I thought it could be “phonetical and semantical” (like in “wanna”) rather than “grammatical”.
There is, however, Ogden Nash’s perfect
But I sometimes visualize in my gin
The Audubon that I audubin.
https://barrythebirder.blogspot.com/2012/09/ogden-nashs-birding-poem.html
I would guess the needs washed construction comes from crossing needs to be washed with needs washing (which is rarer, but apparently the default in some places in the US and no doubt elsewhere).
It’s not like people who grew up in places where “needs washed” was not part of the local dialect immediately adopt it on first exposure because their attachment to the intervening “to be” was pathetically weak. However it may have originally arisen historically, by and large people who say “needs washed” say it because they were exposed to it in childhood and thus never internalized the grammar whereby “to be” compulsorily ought to intervene. And it can change in the other direction – my own father (much more so than my late uncles on that side) consciously learned to Talk Proper and Eschew Dialect to the extent that for pretty much all of my life common Pittsburghisms like “needs washed” have been completely absent from his idiolect, unless he is trying to self-consciously explain how people commonly or stereotypically talk in Pittsburgh.
“because their attachment to the intervening…” – note, that my hypothesis is based on first language acquisition, not acquisition of constructions by fluent speakers.
If a baby finds something superfluous based on how it sounds, that does not mean adults who have learned to think it will feel so. They are likely to be rather indiffererent to the sound.
DM, yes, I forgot about analogy (when listing “phonetics, semantics or grammar”).
Though maybe what I meant by grammar is always also “analogy” (even though “analogy” is not always “grammar”).
Good objections would be
1. if this to be is not phonetically “weak”
2. distribution in childrens’ speech. Mine and several other* hypotheses will predict it there.
* if it IS found there, that won’t mean my hypothesis is true
Not sold on the “semantically weak” explanation for English. However, Kusaal has e.g.
Fuug la nari ba pie.
shirt the merit.LINKER they wash
“The shirt needs washed.”
The interesting thing about this (perfectly grammatical) sentence is that this particular clause linker (underlyingly n) cannot precede a subject pronoun (such as ba), but must come directly before a subordinate verb phrase.
This is one of a couple of cases where non-referential ba, which is used (much as in English) to paraphrase a passive meaning, actually has subtly different syntax from anaphoric ba “they.” Here, because it’s semantically empty, the pronoun gets to break the rule that a subject pronoun cannot follow the linker n.
DE, “phonetically weak”. And not as much an explanation as a question (because I don’t know how it sounds).
@DE, yes, interesting.
The Russian construction similar to “they say” can be understood as a reference to some vague subject (“people”). And IS, I think, understood: when “they” do something that no one other than the local administration can do, the speaker and listener do feel that it is very vague decision makers who run the system in question and not “people”.
I don’t think there’s any parallel, at least in standard English, for “to be” to be completely ellipted because of phonological non-prominence. Even in AAVE, where copulas are absent it’s for syntactic rather than phonological reasons.
Lots of English function words usually have low stress, but nevertheless don’t get elided completely. (Even in Ogden Nash’s playfully extreme and punning “audubin/ought to have been”, the “to” survives.)
Moreover, it’s characteristic of English “allegro” forms like “it’s” or “couldn’tv’e” that they haven’t ousted the full forms, but behave as stylistic variants of them within the same speaker’s idiolect.
Even historically, I don’t think there is any parallel in English to the total loss of a sequence as elaborate as /tubi/.
understood as a reference to some vague subject (“people”)
Indeed: this seems to be common cross-linguistically. The thing that surprised me in Kusaal was not this use of a vague “they”, which seems totally familiar and natural to an English speaker, but the fact that the pronoun actually has slightly different syntax when used in this way, which was not something I expected at all.
I just recently discovered that there are also differences in whether resumptive object pronouns are required in cleft clauses, depending on whether the subject pronoun ba is being used referentially or not in such clauses.
In a nutshell, in a clause with a non-referential subject ba, like
Ba pie fuug la.
they wash shirt the
“The shirt has been washed.”
the object behaves as if it were a subject when it comes to interclausal reference tracking. Which makes sense: the construction is just more thoroughly grammaticised as a “passive construction” in Kusaal than in English, in which this distinction between these different uses of “they” seems to have no effect at all on the actual syntax.
Even in Kusaal, the basic construction in itself is still ambiguous, though: Ba pie fuug la could also just mean “They’ve washed the shirt”, where “they” are some particular people you’ve just been talking about.
Ogden Nash’s playfully extreme and punning “audubin/ought to have been”, the “to” survives.
Wouldn’t you read that “audubin/ought’a been”? — or is ‘a what you mean by ‘survives’? I’d’a thought the ‘a is residue of “‘ave” rather than “to”(?)
Elsewhere I find (or does this belong on the ORNITHONOMY thread)
@drasvi
I did not reply earlier, because the “needs + adj.” construction is not in my dialect. I thought there might be related nonstandard grammar in the US Midland dialect, which has this construction (e.g., as Ryan already said, “likes + adj” and “wants + adj.” are also possible). The only thing I can think of is that the modal verb “want” is open to dropping the following infinitive in a few cases in other varieties of (nonstandard?) English, e.g., “I want out” but never *I like out or *I need out. The “needs + adj.” would therefore be a generalisation in the dialect of a “wants + adj.”, itself a generalisation to more adjectives than are normally permitted.
Another possibility is that the “needs + adj.” construction comes from a nonstandard passivisation of “I need it washed”, etc., in which it is correct English to drop “to be” (compare also “Some like it hot” and “I want it finished by tomorrow”).
As de says, these are grammatical and not phonological subtractions.
I want out
When Snorri Sturluson received the king’s command that he should not depart from Norway back to Iceland, he replied Út vil ek and left anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snorri_Sturluson
Good man. No kings!
@PlasticPaddy: I find, “I need out,” as acceptable as, “I want out,” although it feels like it’s less common. Need is a weird verb, but this construction seems unrelated to the specific peculiarities of need. (Note that when need is used with an infinitive, it can drop the to when negated by a following not or in a question.†
Like a full-strength modal, when need to used with a bare infinitive, without to, it sounds better not conjugated in the third person singular.) However, the “needs washed” construction seems unrelated precisely it has third person singular conjugated verb morphology.
† Need, as nearly a full strength modal, can be used to open a much broader variety of question types than linking verbs like want or like.