WLC 215 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Indigenous Languages Of The Americas, Leonard Bloomfield, Noun Phrase
11 Dec 2017
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Document Summary
Grammar lessons are prescriptive: rules about correct language, which sentences are correct, which are incorrect, old school rules are adopted from latin. Why latin: the written language of the middle ages. Dante- founder of standard italian, though he believed he was writing in latin. If grammar in spoken language used differently from written language, there must be something wrong with the spoken language. Schools attempt to standardize the spoken language (to much resistance and little success). Leonard bloomfield: worked with indians in wisconsin, realized working with a native american language, latin could not describe native american languages. Led linguists to work from the language itself, not starting with latin. People who are inexperienced with non-indo-european languages assumed that these languages were primitive. However, these languages are often very, very complex. Nowadays, we prescribe less tightly to latin even when studying the english language.
