Noncompositional

The first bit of reading for my phonology class this semester is a paper by Edward Sapir (”Sound Patterns in Language” in Language vol 1, 37-51). We received it as a photocopy of what might be from a collection of works, or at least a reprint from the original journal article. At the end there is a passage (by an editor?) that I found rather interesting and amusing.

Besides his book Language, which is read with pleasure and profit by all sorts and conditions of men and is not likely to go out of print in our time, the easiest way to get more of Sapir is in the Selected Writings, U. of California Press, 1949; analysis of his way of thinking will be found in Zellig Harris’s review of this volume, Lang. 27.288 (1951). There was a brillance about Edward Sapir which fascinated and awed all who encountered him, and which is not only evident in his own writings but even lends an extra phosphorescent glow to certain of his pupils’ works. But there are others who sometimes sound like it who actually never were pupils of his: for his contribution was not the developing of any method, but rather the establishing of a charter for the free intellectual play of personalities more or less akin to his own. If their wits happen to be dimmer (and here he had few equals), their blunders may betray the essential irresponsibility of what has been called Sapir’s ‘method’. We welcome the insights of his genius, which allowed no scrap of evidence to escape at least subconscious weighing; where it is possible to check up, we normally find him right; thus we seem captious when we point out that he also said many things which are essentially uncheckable (’invulnerable’) and thus not science.