Letters to Language

Language accepts letters from readers that briefly and succinctly respond to or comment upon either material published previously in the journal or issues deemed of importance to the field. The editor reserves the right to edit letters as needed. Brief replies from relevant parties are included as warranted.

Credit where credit is due

February 24, 2004

To the Editor:

I particularly enjoyed reading your Editor’s Department in the December issue of Language (79.679–81 (2003)), where you mentioned the Moscow Linguistic Olympics organized under the auspices of the Department of Structural and Computational Linguistics within the Philological Faculty of the Moscow State University since 1965. These Olympics (called, in fact, ‘Olympics in Linguistics and Mathematics’) were a very effective means of getting high school students acquainted with linguistic problems (some of them I used myself when teaching linguistics in Brazil and in Australia). And this was a way of luring people into linguistics.

For example, this is how I came into linguistics. In the last year of high school, I was not sure what to do. I was desperate to study classical languages at the Moscow State University, but was told that with my (Jewish) surname they would never take me. So a friend (who had just graduated from the Department of Structural and Computational Linguistics, where they did take people with ‘funny’ surnames) suggested that I should have a go at solving linguistic problems, in the Olympics. So I went there, and got a Second Prize. This consisted of a smart-looking certificate and a pile of books (all in Russian, of course), including a Bengali-Russian dictionary, a Russian-Malayalam Dictionary, a teach-yourself Sinhala book, and a grammar of Hausa. This prize decided the matter for me, as after that I applied to the Department of Structural and Computational Linguistics, passed the entrance exams, and was accepted. From the very first day, I knew straight away that I’d done the right thing.

The most important person and the most brilliant lecturer in the department was Professor Andrej Anatoljevich Zaliznjak, whom you so kindly mentioned on p. 680. He inspired us to carry on doing linguistics despite the dark preperestroika era when we could not refer to the literature we wanted to refer to. He taught us Sanskrit, Akkadian, Old Russian, Arabic, and Introduction to Indo-European. He inspired me to work intensively on important linguistic topics: first, Hittite and other Anatolian languages (for my M.A.), then Berber languages (for my Ph.D.), followed by Modern Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew, languages from the Arawak family of South America, and now languages from the Ndu family of New Guinea. When I last saw him in Moscow (in May 2002), he appreciated not only my linguistic achievements, but also the vivacious smile of Yuamali (Jacqueline), my Papuan consultant.

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
[a.aikhenvald@latrobe.edu.au]

In defense of Fónagy

March 15, 2003

To the Editor:

In a book notice (Language 79.3.652) on Ivan Fónagy’s Languages within language: An evolutive approach (John Benjamins, 2001), Alan Kaye writes that the author ‘erroneously maintains that onomatopoetic words are arbitrary’. This shows a misreading of the text. Fónagy writes exactly the opposite, first indicating that Saussure argued that even onomatopoetic words are arbitrary because they vary crosslinguistically. Fónagy does this to show that ‘the alleged arbitrariness of onomatopoeic words consists of the language-dependent selection between a number of motivated (iconic) expressions’ (pp. 2–3). Thus, he emphasizes that such words are iconically motivated but that a language’s conventional phonemic and morphological structure may alter and conventionalize the sound-shape of the form being mimicked. The reviewer’s misinterpretation is all the stranger because the book in question is one long search for the motivated (or iconic) element in language.

Kaye notes that the ‘book has been years in the making . . . and [that] even a cursory glance at the enormous bibliography . . . is proof enough that much effort has been exerted gathering information in semiotics, linguistics, psychology’, etc. True enough, but it seems that the reviewer...