Ge xe na soa parassa e ti ti xe na bagassa
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From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
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Sent: 02 April 2015 15:05
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Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Linguistic Botany
My last post today!
In a message dated 4/1/2015 6:20:14 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx writes:
"Maybe [Russell] thought that the linguistic botanists were..."
not philosophical enough? In any case, the doctrine has a pedigree history!
In "The Beginnings of Morphology: Linguistic Botanizing in the 18th Century" P.
B. Salmon provides an assured basis in morphology for subsequent phonological
comparison Sir William Jones's celebrated remarks about the resemblance and
relationship between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin marked a turning point in the
study of language.
J. L. Austin and H. P. Grice would occasionally apply linguistic botany to the
two other languages they knew (in this order: 'a lot of Greek and a little
Latin' -- just to provoke the Shakespearians).
Some scholars anticipated William James's conclusions, Salmon argues, but
their findings appear to have remained largely unknown.
At much the same time as the forms of languages were beginning to be compared,
investigations were being made in greater detail than hitherto into structural
resemblances between different species of plants.
Indeed, this -- botany -- has a LONG pedigree starting with Aristotle, whom
Hart knew by 'heart', as he liked to say!
In botanical studies explicit evolutionary statements based on such
observations are few and far between, but in the study of language, similarity
of form implies filiation.
Austin's linguistic botanizers (or botanisers, or botanists, as Grice
prefered) were never so serious. If you are discussing 'belief', you need to
provide a FAMILY of related concepts ('opine', 'think', 'surmise'). Never mind
'knowledge'. Similarly for ANY field of philosophy worth discussing:
Strawson plays with linguistic botany of metaphysical concepts in
"Individuals:
an essay in descriptive metaphysics", and Hare spends the first part of
"Language of Morals" providing a linguistic botany of orders that are yet
orders but not moral, and their linguistic expression.
P. B. Salmon's study sets out to compare some of the lines of thought common
mainly to comparative linguistics and comparative anatomy (Austin's linguistic
botany is, as Russell notes, in "The cult of common usage" a NEWER, thing,
indeed, the keyword for the minor revolution in philosophy, the linguistic
turn, that he would rather not be seen as part of -- but wasn't his background
mainly mathematics back at Cambridge -- I don't think he engaged originally for
his degree in philosophical studies _per se_). Salmon concludes by suggesting
that in the biological sciences, too, resemblance implied common origin sooner
and more generally than is sometimes held.
How Austin got to become the most famous linguistic botanist of all time is
minimally touched by P. B. Salmon, but then, you can't have your cake once you
have eaten it.
Cheers,
Speranza
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