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Trey Jones on December 22, 2010
Unfortunately, this book is largely linguistic hogwash, dressed up as deduction and reason, with the apparent aim of promoting Chinese as a superior language with a superior writing system. You can read much of the author's work without laying out $80 for the book at this website: [...]
The claim of a lack of a unified framework in linguistics is untrue. Rather, there are none that are popular with the dominant generativist paradigm. Structuralism and stratificationalism were unified paradigms. They just didn't pan out.
The examples, which ought to be exemplary, are opaque and fail to make the author's point. ("A handmade object made from an intelligent saying" is not transparently a book.)
Several of the "old paradigm" premises are straw men. Contrary to the claims of the author, knowing Spanish made learning French much easier for me (and it turns out I can read Catalan without ever having studied it). I acquired written French with better proficiency and more quickly than spoken French because the orthography is easier to acquire than the phonetics. The author's claims make more sense for unrelated and dissimilar languages, like Chinese and English, but are not universal.
The author's typology of languages is simplistic and idealized. Constructed languages, like Esperanto, are much more "axiomatic" than Chinese, and are still not always compositionally transparent. The claims of the iconicity of the Chinese language, like claims of the iconicity of ASL, have some basis in history, but are not representative of the richness and abstract arbitrariness of any natural language.
The author's entire argument is just another attempt to prove one language and culture superior to another, when linguistically and anthropologically, there is no basis for that claim.
Linguistics wants to be a science (perhaps too much so), and this muddled pseudo-philosophy is a step in the wrong direction. This kind of bogus argumentation is what gives the social sciences a bad name.
The claim of a lack of a unified framework in linguistics is untrue. Rather, there are none that are popular with the dominant generativist paradigm. Structuralism and stratificationalism were unified paradigms. They just didn't pan out.
The examples, which ought to be exemplary, are opaque and fail to make the author's point. ("A handmade object made from an intelligent saying" is not transparently a book.)
Several of the "old paradigm" premises are straw men. Contrary to the claims of the author, knowing Spanish made learning French much easier for me (and it turns out I can read Catalan without ever having studied it). I acquired written French with better proficiency and more quickly than spoken French because the orthography is easier to acquire than the phonetics. The author's claims make more sense for unrelated and dissimilar languages, like Chinese and English, but are not universal.
The author's typology of languages is simplistic and idealized. Constructed languages, like Esperanto, are much more "axiomatic" than Chinese, and are still not always compositionally transparent. The claims of the iconicity of the Chinese language, like claims of the iconicity of ASL, have some basis in history, but are not representative of the richness and abstract arbitrariness of any natural language.
The author's entire argument is just another attempt to prove one language and culture superior to another, when linguistically and anthropologically, there is no basis for that claim.
Linguistics wants to be a science (perhaps too much so), and this muddled pseudo-philosophy is a step in the wrong direction. This kind of bogus argumentation is what gives the social sciences a bad name.
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