I thought it was Saussure Harris was interested in and not the things Saussure found interesting. Saussure found a sort of invisible noise in LIthuanian,with a parallel ancient Greek noise to prove the Lithuanian sound was actually there,and got a linguistics law named after him. Many years later his principle allowed other to translate HIttite. They were quite sure they had actually translated what had been written partly because of the breathtaking triteness of the content.(By the way fellas, doesn't this truncated account of learning the meaning of ancient cuneiform writing square rather poorly with the theory of words meaning what you want them to mean? Very Humpty Dumpty of you to insist on it.) HArris was interested in intellectual history and apparently there was some surprise at his appointment to the linguistics chair. Kate Sullivan
-----Original Message----- From: Tom McCormack <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Sat, May 19, 2012 7:00 pm Subject: Re: On Roy Harris 2 0f 2 On May 19, 2012, at 5:47 PM, William Conger wrote:
It just kills me to have to say, sadly, with deep remorse and
downcast eyes
that I wonder why people who have never published in linguistic
theory are so
much smarter field than those who have. Maybe it's like sports when
the
spectators are always better players and coaches than those actually
on the
field playing the game.
William -- I wouldn't begin to put myself in a class with Harris about Attic Greek, Indo European, the Zero Copula status of Chinexe, Indonesia, etc. That sort of thing is what i Have in mind when I say "linguistics". But the Harris topics I've been attacking have all been philosophy of language, of mind and ontology. I was a shallow lout in college, but I did manage to get the first 4.0 GPA in my Ivy League college since before WWII, and I was a philosophy major, so I brought some equipment to the job. And I've now spent a good part of the last ten years reading in the areas of philosophy pertinent to Harris's topics in this discussion. I feel qualified in equipment and "learning" to comment on Harris.
