The Grammarian and His Language by Edward Sapir

THE normal man of intelligence has something of a contempt for linguistic studies, convinced as he is that nothing can well be more useless. Such minor usefulness as he concedes to them is of a purely instrumental nature. French is worth studying because there are French books that are worth reading. Greek is worth studying-if it is-because a few plays and a few passages of verse, written in that curious and extinct vernacular, have still the power to disturb our hearts-if indeed they have. For the rest, there are excellent translations, Now, it is a notorious fact that the linguist is not necessarily very deeply interested in the abiding things that language has done for us. He handles languages very much as the zoologist handles dogs. The zoologist examines the dog carefully, then he dissects him in order to examine him still more carefully, and finally, noting resemblances between him and his cousins, the wolf and the fox, and differences between him and his more distant relations, the cat and the bear, he assigns him his place in the evolutionary scheme of animated nature, and has done. Only as a polite visitor, not as a zoologist, is he even mildly interested in Towzer's sweet parlor tricks, however fully he may recognize the fact that these tricks could never have evolved unless the dog had evolved first. To return to the philologist and the layman by whom he is judged, it is a precisely parallel indifference to the beauty wrought by the instrument which nettles the judge. And yet the cases are not altogether parallel. When Towzer has performed his tricks and when Ponto has san:J the drowning man's life, they relapse, it is true, into the status of mere Jog--but even the zoologist· s dog is of interest to all of us. But when Achilles has bewailed the death of his beloved Patroclus and Clyta::mnestra has done her worst, what are we to do with the Greek aorists that are left on our hands? There is a traditional mode of procedure which arranges them into patterns. It is called grammar. The man who is in charge of grammar and is called a grammarian is regarded by all plain men as a frigid and dehumanized pedant. It is not difficult to understand the very pallid status of linguistics in America. The purely instrumental usefulness of language study is recognized, of course, but there is not and cannot be in this country that daily concern with foreign modes of expression that is so natural on the continent of Europe, where a number of languages jostle each other in every-day life. In the absence of a strong practical motive for linguistic pursuits the remoter, more theoretical, motives arc hardly given the opportunity to flower. Bue it would be a profound mistake to ascribe our current indifference to philological matters entirely to the fact that English alone serves us well enough for all practical purposes. There is something about language itself, or rather about linguistic differences, that offends the American spirit. That spirit is rationalistic to the very marrow of its bone. Conscious! y, if not unconscious! y, we are inclined to impatience with any object or idea or system of things which cannot giv(: a four-square reckoning of itself in terms of reason and purpose. We see this spirit pervading our whole scientific out-