Linguistics

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30442, 16 May 1964, Page 4

Linguistics

Voices of Man. By Mario Pei. Allen and Unwin. 138 pp.

Should a scholar whose views are unfashionable undertake to popularise his subject? If so, should he urge his side of the case in the controversies that enliven the subject? If his study is documented with references to the work of his opponents, and the polemic is in good taste, at least such a book will be without the insipidity which is frequent in popular accounts of academic work. Mario Pei, Professor of Romance Linguistics at Columbia University, has written such a book. He kept apart from the structural linguistics which dominated American studies of language until recently, and so is critical of the purposes and findings of his fellow linguists, but his discussion is lively and factual with adequate notes referring readers to the sources of variant opinions on the topics he discusses.

Only once, in the final chapter, does the tone become embarrassing, when he sees sinister motives behind the current (and many think, understandable) neglect of the promotion of an international language among linguists.

Professor Pei is less informative than his opponents about how language works, so that we learn little from him about the sound and form (phonology and grammar) of language. His strength is in discussing the external problems of language, its place in society and in education, its history and the history of its study. Since these matters are of public interest, they are well suited to a book addressed to a wide audience. The emphasis is on language as a humane study and this is a desirable emphasis, since, though we need not deny the claims of linguistics to be a science, it is also more than a science. The history of its study, sketched very ably in the first chapter, corrects the overemphasis on novelty in some recent works on linguistics, and emphasises the value of traditions of study that took some centuries to establish.

Professor Pei arranges his book as a series of problems for discussion. Relations of language with logic or aesthetics, the origin of language, its relations with race, nationality and religion, the classification of languages, the comparative method. languages in contact and meaning are discussed. A particularly interesting question for the general reader is the question of authority and usage, since this and the related question of the relations between spoken and written language are central to the chief application of linguistic theory in daily life, the teaching of the languages of civilisation in schools.

It is a pity that a book packed closely with facts and opinions worth recalling should be published without an index.