It says a lot about the broken sensibilities of higher education that an Historian The author of the blog post kindly submitted here is not a historian by occu

It says a lot about the broken sensibilities of higher education that an Historian The author of the blog post kindly submitted here is not a historian by occupation or training. He is a linguist who specializes in the study of the English language.[1] (He is a co-author of the definitive grammar of English, the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.[2]) He writes "Let me state very clearly that I don’t intend any of this in triumphalist spirit" because that is the way that all scholars trained in linguistics write about language differences: languages are not better or worse, if they are natural human languages, but just arbitrarily different in interesting ways that seem to have an arbitrary relationship to their use in human society. That includes the issue of which languages become widespread around the world and which do not--that appears to have very little to do with specific features of each language, despite some of the discussion here. [1] http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/ http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/ http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/wikipedia_is_wrong.html http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/wikipedia_is_wrong.html [2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/0521431468 http://www.amazon.com/The-Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language...