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Geoff Nunberg on e-mail community.
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[This originally appeared in slightly different form on The Linguist List
Date: Sun, 15 Oct 1995 10:04:58 PDT From: nunberg@parc.xerox.com (Geoffrey Nunberg) Topic... Comment Gimcrack Nation I would like to thank the 47 people that responded to my question about "mazel tov" earlier this week. I have just told my friend who prints T-shirts that she can be assured that it is not an obscene expression. Posting to the Linguist List, 5.1400 IT HAPPENS WITH INCREASING frequency that I spend an hour or so late in the evening cleaning up my electronic mail only to log on the first thing in the morning to find that I have seventeen new messages. It puts me in mind of something that happened on a Sunday morning many years ago when I lived in New York. I had an English visitor staying with me, who offered to go downstairs to pick up the Times that was waiting in the lobby. He came back bearing the paper in his outstretched arms with a bemused expression on his face. "Good Lord," he said, "Whatever can have happened since yesterday?" In my present circumstances, of course, what has happened since yesterday is usually about 15 lines like the following: 179- 12-May linguist@tam2000.tamu.edu 6.671, Qs: Conflict talk, Mongolian, $ 180- 12-May linguist@tam2000.tamu.edu 6.670, Confs: Society of Belgian Ling$ 181- 12-May linguist@tam2000.tamu.edu6.673, Calls: Ling Assoc of Great Bri$ 182- 12-May linguist@tam2000.tamu.edu 6.675, Qs: Pos tagger, Bibliography, $ 183- 12-May linguist@tam2000.tamu.edu 6.674, Qs: T-test/correlation, Tagalo$ 184- 13-May linguist@tam2000.tamu.edu 6.676,FYI: URL from Umea U, Seminar $ 185- 13-May linguist@tam2000.tamu.edu 6.677, Sum: Comparative dictionaries So begins another round of triage. Most I get rid of immediately, the way I toss the "Fashions of the Times" and "The Sophisticated Traveler" before I bring the paper inside. Some I skim before deleting. A few I set aside, like the Times magazine section and book review, with the idea that I will get to them later; they sit around for months on end (growing brittle and yellow, as I think of them) until I get a message telling me that I have exceeded my disk quota. I suppose I could unsub myself from the list, the way I have from most of the others that I signed up for in the first flush of my discovery of connectedness. In successive fits of informational austerity I have stopped taking several other language-related lists and electronic journals, not to mention lists on digital libraries and the history of publishing, and most wrenchingly, the "cuisine-fr" list that comes out of the University of Rennes, with its loving chronicles of the history of the Poitevin stringbean. And of course the Linguist List is accessible via the web now, so I have the option of simply checking it out every so often without having to worry about those hectoring messages from the sysadmin. Still, I will probably hang in there. For one thing, the Linguist List really is the best run, best organized list I know of; you spend a couple of hours wandering around the four corners of the cyber-kingdom and you want nothing so much as to click your mouse three times and say, "There's no place like home." And the fact is that I like to wake up in the morning and find this pile of messages on the virtual doorstep, for pretty much the same reason I like to be able to open the door of my house in San Francisco and find the Times (in a national edition, now) sitting on the real one. It gives me a sense of continuity and "imagined community," in Benedict Anderson's phrase. This is nothing like "virtual community," a phrase that I can't help interpreting on the model of "virtual memory," "virtual reality," and the like, as referring to something that evanesces as soon as you open the blinds, whereas the linguists are there even when the server goes down. But there is a feeling of confraternity that comes of knowing that linguists all over the world are having to deal with seventeen new messages at more-or-less the same time that I am, in the same way that the reading of the morning paper -- a "paradoxical mass ceremony," Anderson calls it -- helped to give rise to the particular sense of community that underlies the modern nation: "It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion."1 Of course the world of linguistics is nowhere near so impersonal or anonymous a community as the modern nation, and doesn't require quite so extended an act of imagination to reconstruct. We have our societies and conferences and our colleges, visible and invisible, and we are all connected by the dense web of transitive personal ties that can only fully emerge in a small field that doesn't stand on ceremony. (There can't be many linguists left in America who have never sat down with Jim McCawley at a Chinese restaurant somewhere.) But up to now this sense of the professional community is something we have only been able experience in a subjective way, each from his or her individual point of view; we rarely get to see it laid out in front of us in the view from all over. Certainly the print literature provides almost no information about the daily practices or the social territory of the field, apart from such hints as could be gleaned from acknowledgments, references, and the like. You think of sociologists of science assiduously tabulating citations and cross-citations in Linguistic Inquiry or NLLT, and you wonder how they could ever arrive at a relief map of the continent of schmooze that the whole enterprise is built on. We still call them "journals," but they bear only an etymological relation to their newsy seventeenth-century antecedents. IF WE ARE LOOKING FOR a print analogue for the modern electronic list, in fact, it may be instructive to consider those first scientific journals, which began to emerge on the heels of the establishment of the earliest postal services. There was De Sallo's Journal des Savants, which first appeared in 1665, and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which began publication in the same year "on the first Monday of every month, if [there be] sufficient matter for it."2 The Transactions was initially launched as a private venture aimed at providing "brief Records of the Emergent Works and Productions...and of the growth of Useful Inventions and Arts," with Henry Oldenbourg as its editor -- or perhaps "moderator" is a more accurate term, since much of the contents consisted of material that Oldenbourg had excerpted from his own correspondence or of correspondence forwarded to him. These he passed on to the readers under an editorial policy that he described as "sit penes authorem [sic] fides [let the author be responsible]: we only set it down, as it was related to us...." Not surprisingly, the contributions were highly varied in subject matter, genre, length, and quality. Among the contents of the first issues, for example, were an eight-line summary of a report from "the ingenious Mr. Hook[e]" about "a spot on one of the Belts in Jupiter"; abridgements of letters on optics that Oldenbourg had received from Leeuwenhoeck; an account by Thomas Wright, Esquire, of a curious sand-flood in the County of Suffolk; a note on some new optical instruments fashioned in Rome; a communication from an "understanding and hardy Seaman" on the subject of whale-fishing in the Bermudas; and a letter, forwarded to the Royal Society by Boyle himself, relating the birth of a "very Odd Monstrous Calf." The authors and readership of the Philosophical Transactions were scarcely less assorted than its content: alongside of Boyle, Wren, Hooke and other genuine savants -- it is 200 years too soon to speak of "scientists" -- there were the gentlemen "virtuosi" like Evelyn, Sprat, and the amateur microscopist and naval architect Samuel Pepys (who turned out to have been keeping a journal of his own in which he recorded,inter alia, his attendance at the meetings of the Royal Society, and who some years later in his capacity as President of the Society would license the publication of Newton's Principia). Indeed, science and technology enjoyed a vogue as intense then as now, and the rhetoric of progress from both periods can sound remarkably similar, if you make the necessary allowances for the stylistic differences between Pepys and Alvin Toffler. It was all too much for whiggish critics like Thomas Shadwell. In his play The Virtuoso he satirized the Society's dilettantish amateurs in the person of Sir Nicholas Gimcrack (a word that at the time could mean both "fop" and "mechanical contrivance"), whose enthusiasms might have been drawn from the table of contents of the Philsophical Transactions: microscopy, blood transfusions, air pumps, and the theory of putrefaction. The parallels with the new forms and institutions of electronic discourse are too evident to need elaborating. It takes only a slight leap to imagine the what the Philosophical Transactions might have looked like if Oldenbourg and his readers had had the net at their disposal: 191- 12-May PhilTrans@RSoc.gresham.ac.uk 2.62, Sinkholes (was Sand-Floods) 192- 12-May PhilTrans@RSoc.gresham.ac.uk 2.63, [JScav@ac.fr: [ActaErud@leipz$ 193- 12-May PhilTrans@RSoc.gresham.ac.uk 2.64 Last posting: Monstrous calves 194- 12-May PhilTrans@RSoc.gresham.ac.uk 2.65, Refrangibility of light rays 195- 12-May PhilTrans@RSoc.gresham.ac.uk 2.66, Fix for leaky air-pumps 196- 12-May PhilTrans@RSoc.gresham.ac.uk 2.67, Ether wind...NOT! And in the light of our own recent experience with so similar a form, we can perhaps have a new sympathy for Shadwell's point of view. Surely even those readers of the Transactions who were sympathetic to the Society's project must have received each issue with the same mixture of interest and irritation that I feel every time another packet of postings from the Linguist List is dumped over the transom. Sometimes, if you will excuse the expression, the journal must have been a royal pain. Readers must have wearied at having to sort out the contributions of the Hookes and Leeuwenhoeks from all those communications from Nicholas Gimcrack and his ilk. (You wonder whether the more scholarly readers of the Transactions tended to skip over the contributions that came in from anyone with an "Esq." at the end of his name, the way some academic readers of the Linguist List give short shrift to postings from anyone whose email address ends with "compuserve.com.") And indeed, from the late seventeenth century onwards there is a steady stream of complaints about the mounting volume of print material that readers had to cope with and the increasing difficulty of extracting the wheat from the chaff.3 We should bear in mind that the impression of an "information explosion" has been equally valid in every age; relatively speaking, after all, an exponential curve looks just as scary wherever you get on board. So it's understandable that scientific journals tended to become more specialized over the course of time, and to restrict access to their pages to qualified contributors. (The Philosophical Transactions came late to this course; a 1756 critic, while granting that the Royal Society was "in the right to encourage the ingenious of all classes and denominations to transmit their discoveries and hints of improvements," took the editors to task for publishing too many "crude essays that cannot appear with propriety among the works of the learned," and urged them "to have a greater regard to the reputation of the Society than to exhibit such abortive productions."4) The tendency was brought to completion in the nineteenth century, when specialized technical journals became the preferred vehicles for detailed accounts of scientific research, at the same time that disciplines and faculties were definitively compartmentalized and professionalized, and the term "scientist" was introduced as a job title that conferred an official right to speak. Raymond Williams described the new order: "In the republic of letters, a man can live as himself, but in the bureaucracy of letters he must continually declare his style and department, and submit to an examination of his purpose and credentials at the frontier to every field."5 ALL OF WHICH BRINGS US TO THE PRESENT, as new technologies threaten to overturn all the established territorial boundaries. Forms like email and the web, people say, will lead inevitably to the end of traditional disciplinarity, by creating discursive spaces in which new forms of discourse can unfold themselves: "Information technology has the potential to bring about profound changes in intellectual knowledge," writes one contributor to an electronic journal, "because it can provide this middle stage area [i.e., the space of immediate collective communication--GN], an area in which the "specialized" commonplaces of disciplinary discourse can no longer maintain their separateness."6 Well I can't speak to the situation of the sciences or humanities in general, but its hard to see any signs of the process in our own field. It's true that there are a lot of nonlinguist participants in the discussions on the Linguist List, some of them from neighboring disciplines, some of them just kibitzers who have wandered in off the street. But with occasional exceptions, these participants haven't had much effect in shifting the discursive center of gravity. On the contrary, net discussions seem to rely on those "specialized commonplaces of disciplinary discourse" even more than other kinds of disciplinary colloquy do, if only because the medium tends to obscure or eliminate the institutional roles and safeguards that ordinarily invest a written communication with authority. There was a telling example on the Linguist List a few months ago, when a philosopher wrote in a query on behalf of a friend: A colleague who makes his living as a translator of technical dox asked me something yesterday that I couldn't answer. "But", I told him, "I bet I know where to find some folks who CAN answer.!" So, folks, here it is: "How did it come about that Western European languages such as English, French, Spanish and Portuguese have chosen to make most plural words by adding an 's' or 'es' to the singular? Italian, Greek, German, and, I believe, the Slavic languages do not do this. Latin did not either." A month or so later, the questioner posted a summary of answers, which included all of the following: English -s is a loan from French, the Germanic plural in English being seen today only in the marginal cases like feet and oxen.... Actually the Latin accusative plurals and dative and ablative plurals in all genders ended in -s. In early English, when it was still an inflected language using many of the Latin endings, the vowel endings dropped as time went on. This meant that the only distinguishing feature separating plural from singular nouns was the -s termination. So, English did get it from Latin... The answer is historical accident, in that Proto-Indo-European had a number of plural types in -s, which have survived in various shapes in different groups within the larger family. E.g. Old English had a set of plurals in -as, which are the source of our modern -s plurals, and this -s- element also appears in Latin in some declensions...7 Sit penes lectorem fides. The writer had indeed found some folks who could answer his colleague's question, the problem being that he apparently had no way of telling them from the linguistic wannabes who happened to be sitting in on the discussion. You think of an American who shows up at a party in Paris speaking high-school French, unable to discern the accents that mark off half the other guests as Americans, as well. But from our own perspective, the participation of all these visiting virtuosi is only a source of noise, rather than of confusion. We can tell the cuckoos in our net, and continue our conversation as if they weren't present. On the whole, in fact, these lists probably tend to reinforce rather than efface disciplinary boundaries, especially in a thinly populated field like ours, since they open new channels between all those linguists who are sequestered away in their own private Idahos, and who up to now have had no one to talk to on a daily basis but the philosophers or the literary historians down the hall. Now every phonologist walks into her office in the knowledge that there is an audience just a few keystrokes away that is poised to receive her night thoughts on the mora in Tlingit (or in Klingon, for that matter). But the boundaries are more porous where our own gimcrackery is concerned. The nineteenth-century immurement of the disciplines had the effect not just of clearing their public discourse of unlicensed practitioners, but also of privatizing most of what the licensed practitioners have had to say about their science, as opposed to in it. The amateur epistemologizing and sociologizing, the pedagogical and technical lore, the gossip, the institutional politics, the anectdotal observations about curiosities that lie outside the realm of current theory -- all of this was relegated to the classroom, to the cafeteria, or to private letters, allowed to surface publicly only in privileged contexts like necrologies or the "News and Views" column of Science. And as I suggested a moment ago, what is most compelling about the Linguist List and its analogues is the effect of seeing all of this material suddently bubbling forth into public view. Of course it can be embarrasing on occasion to see our private discourse recorded in this form; it highlights and magnifies our excesses like a home video of a boisterous family party. As Geoff Pullum has gently pointed out in these very pages, for example, we linguists have a certain proclivity for philosophical excursuses, but before the appearance of the Linguist List I don't think anyone really appreciated to what an extent this tendency has been tempered in the print literature by the existence of editors and referees and by an unspoken editorial convention that holds that no author ought to be allowed to engage in metatheoretical lucubrations without providing at least the semblance of an empirical pretext for them. It can be a little wearying to see the list swell with exchanges that disregard the customary proportions of philosophical allusions to empirical points, so that the Hempl-to-example ratio nears infinity. And the amateur sociologizing and theory-baiting can even more disconcerting. There was a long and heated discussion a while ago that was sparked by a correspondent's allegation that it was an matter of doctrine among GB adherents that one ought to teach students to ignore all data that was embarrassing to the theory, a conclusion garnered on the basis of a report from a student who had earlier taken a syntax course at a GB-dominated institution. The moderators eventually had the good sense to cut this one off, but not before it came to bear an uncomfortable resemblance to one of those radio talk shows where callers draw sweeping generalizations on the basis of muddled anecdotes about affirmative action or police brutality. A few exchanges like this and you begin to long for a heavier hand at the discursive spigot. It may be, as the enthusiasts of the new media like to say, that "information wants to be free," but that's no reason for always giving it its way. But ultimately the annoyances of the list are more than offset by its virtues. I'm thinking here not so much of its obvious usefulness as a way of circulating public announcements, queries, publication notices and the like, as of the agreeable buzz of its chatter. There are the discussions of Eskimo words for snow, of Estonian language policy, and linguistics in science fiction. There are the offbeat queries that demonstrate just how widely, in every sense, our nets are cast: a subscriber in Malta who asks for information about linguistic analysis of rap lyrics; a subscriber in Mexico who wants to know about the criteria for judging the Welsh singing competitions called eisteddfodau. And there are those discussions of the semantic and syntactic curiosities that are our own equivalents of sand-floods and monstrous calves. A topic like "words that are their own opposites" (e.g., cleave, Lat. altus, and the like) provokes a seemingly endless exchange of anecdotal data, most of it from echte linguists, and only sporadically sullied by the attempt to draw some broader theoretical conclusion. It reminds you that philologists all begin their lives as logophiles. It all takes sorting through, of course, but I find that it is not necessary actually to open most of the numbers; it reassuring enough simply to know that there are folks out there somewhere who are keeping track of linguistics in science fiction and the use of definite articles in place-names. As the Times used to say in its ads, "You may not read it all, but it's nice to know it's there." Now if anyone has a way to keep cream cheese off my keyboard... 1 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 39-40. 2 The Journal des Savants was a precursor of the modern journal in more than just its contents, since it frequently ran afoul of the royal censors and had to be printed in Holland and smuggled in across the border. 3Cf Pope's complaints in the Dunciad (I, 37-44) about the early eighteenth-century pulluation of "Journals, Medleys, Merc'ries, Magazines..." 4 Quoted in David Kronick, Scientific and Technical Periodicals of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Metuchen, N.J. : Scarecrow Press, 1991), p 161. 5 Raymond Williams, "David Hume: Reasoning and experience," Writing in Society (London : Verso, [1983]) p 121. 6 Doug Brent, "Information technology and the Breakdown of 'Places' of Knowledge, EJournal, 4, 4; December 19, 1994; EJOURNAL%ALBNYVMS.bitnet@uacsc2.albany.edu 7 "Sum: Plurals in '-s'", The Linguist List, 5.971, September 8, 1994. ```
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