I noticed a book on my shelf I couldn’t identify, so I pulled it down to see what it was. The title, An Introduction to Middle English, made me wince. Just how many such books do I need? But then I read the preface and discovered it is written in terms of the late 20th century paradigm of syntactical analysis rather than the early 20th century works modeled on 19th century Junggrammatiker. (I note the HBO series of Grimms’ tales; something tells me there won’t be much linguistics in it). So I’m going to have to keep it. Same with the Soviet collection of grammatical sketches of languages of the USSR, including Turkic, Mongol-Manchurian, Paleosiberian, and Eskimo-Aleut languages. Who knows when I’ll want to peruse a detailed grammar of Chukchi?
Pat’s Polemics
On-going brilliance
