A Linguist's Credo (review)

This volume reprints thirteen of Christophersen’s essays penned over a long and distinguished career. He is well-known for his accomplishments not only as an Anglicist but also as a general linguist. Thus, in many ways he has, probably intentionally, followed in the footsteps of his countryman, the great Dane—Otto Jespersen, who retired five years before C enrolled as a student at the University of Copenhagen in 1930. C, in fact, served as a research assistant under a grant from the Carlsberg Foundation in the preparation of Vol. VI of Jespersen’s famous Modern English grammar. One can read about his relationship with Jespersen in Ch. 4, “On English grammar and related topics: A conversation with Prof. Paul Christophersen’ (71–79), a 1981 interview by Pablo Dominguez, the editor of Revista canaria de estudios Ingleses. Herein, C speaks candidly about Jespersen’s linguistic views. Concerning language teaching, he has this to say: ‘he [Jespersen] would have been disappointed in the relatively insignificant role that phonetics seems to play nowadays’ (74); and on linguistic terminology, many linguists today would also agree with Jespersen’s dislike for ‘modern linguistic jargon, his own motto being: “what’s worth saying is worth saying simply” ’ (74). An entire chapter (Ch. 5, 81–92), in fact, is devoted to the exploration of ‘Jespersen and second-language learning’. This was originally presented as an address at the University of Copenhagen in 1993 at a symposium commemorating the 50th anniversary of Jespersen’s death. C asserts that Jespersen agreed with writers such as Henry Sweet on the importance of phonetic transcription (82) but was opposed to the use of translation as a foreign language learning strategy, following the lead of Wilhelm Viëtor (88). In the area of diachronic linguistics, C makes it clear that Jespersen in 1886 came out against the Junggrammatiker. Not generally known, however, is C’s relating that Jespersen considered his own English to be nonnative, despite his six-month residence in the United Kingdom and two stays in the United States as a Visiting Professor (81, 89).

Let us now take up a few of the papers. Ch. 1, ‘Settling Hoti’s business: or: The linguist at work’ (13–30) was C’s inaugural address as Professor of English at the New University of Ulster, first published in 1977 in Northern Ireland Speech and Language Forum. He opines unconvincingly that linguists do not have any right to condemn prescriptive grammar (25) while simultaneously persuasively arguing that he does not ‘wish to defend pedantic insistence on worthless shibboleths’ (24). Further commenting on the realm of linguistics as a science, Ch. 2, ‘Linguistics: Science or mysticism’ (31–45) once again condemns linguists such as Jean Aitchison for chastising Robert Lowth, Bishop of London in 1777–87, for his prescriptive rules (43–44). C tries to make the case that a linguist is like a doctor. What good is a doctor, he asks, who merely describes diseases without prescribing treatment (44)? But, I believe, the analogy is fallacious in using the erroneous premise that native speakers who say ‘ain’t’, e.g., are suffering from a disease and thus that their language needs a cure.

Among the most interesting papers are the last two, on English in West Africa. Ch. 12 (149–57), a review article of John Spencer, ed., The English language in West Africa (London: Longmans, 1971), originally published in English studies (1973), makes important observations on key issues such as diglottia (not to be confused with the well-known diglossia which involves a standard language), in which West African Pidgin English alternates with the more standard West African (acrolectic) English (150). Ch. 13, ‘West African English words’ (159–72), takes up, among other topics, the etymologies of two common West African words: dash ‘gift’ and ju-ju ‘idol, fetish’. The former derives from a Romance etymon meaning #x02018;tribute’; however, the specific donor language is not given. C rejects the OED’s etymology for the latter < French jou...