Why a linguistic society?

Why a linguistic society? Leonard Bloomfield‡ Students of language do not need to ask Why a linguistic society? but many laymen have asked this question. The answer, to be sure, lies really in our work and in its results; but, for this very reason, it is desirable that our motives be understood. The immediate answer is simple: of course, we seek the possibility of meeting and knowing each other. In our country are scholars who for a generation or more have worked in linguistics and have never met; some of them saw each other for the first time at our initial meeting on December 28th. For ourselves this is answer enough, but for the layman it is no answer at all, and leads him only to restate his question: Why should So-and-so want to meet So-and-so? and What have you, after all, in common? and Why will not the existing societies, Philological, Oriental, Modern Language, Anthropological, Psychological, and what not, serve you as meeting-places? The layman—natural scientist, philologian, or man in the street—does not know that there is a science of language. Such a science, however, exists; its aims are so well defined, its methods so well developed, and its past results so copious, that students of language feel as much need for a professional society as do adherents of any other science. The science of language, dealing with the most basic and simplest of human social institutions, is a human (or mental or, as they used to say, moral) science. It is most closely related to ethnology, but precedes ethnology and all other human sciences in the order of growing complexity, for linguistics stands at their foot, immediately after psychology, the connecting link between the natural sciences and the human. The methods of linguistics resemble those of the natural sciences, and so do its results, both in their certainty and in their seeming by no means obvious, but rather, in many instances, paradoxical to the common sense of the time. This position of linguistic science appears at the very outset in its methods of observation. The work of directly observing and recording human speech is much like the work of the ethnologist; indeed, in our country, where such field-work has been best done, it has been performed chiefly by the ethnologic-linguistic school. But, linguistics demands, to mention a difference, the recording of speech-movements or of the resultant sound-waves. For this purpose a kind of simplified physiology of speech has hitherto been used; as it is in many ways unsatisfactory, methods of mechanical observation, both physiologic and acoustic, are being developed. The layman usually has no conception of this task; he believes that languages which possess no written literature are mere 'dialects' or 'jargons', of small extent and subject to no fixed rule. Quite by contrast, linguistics finds, on the one hand, a similarity, repugnant to the common-sense view, between the languages of highly civilized people End Page 159 and those of savages, a similarity which disregards the use or non-use of writing. In every speech-community, certain combinations (morphemes) of a very limited number of types of vocal sounds (phonemes) are socially fixed as reactions to certain stimuli and as stimuli to certain reactions coordinated with the former stimuli (meaning). These habits—the structure and vocabulary of the language—are as exactly and firmly maintained, and their number and variety are as great in ruder societies as in our own. On the other hand, the differences are equally striking: the categories of Latin grammar, such as its parts of speech, are by no means universal, but represent merely one type of structure; other languages arrange the morphemes—sentences, clauses, phrases, words, compound-members, stems, affixes, and the like—upon entirely different patterns. It remains for linguistics to determine what is widespread and what little is common to all human speech. For the speech of the past we depend upon written documents. Here we have the problem of interpreting into terms of language the written characters which never consistently symbolize these terms, and sometimes, as in Chinese, scarcely indicate them at all. Without dwelling upon the difficult...