Language and Human Nature

Exposes a century's worth of flawed thinking about language, to exhibit some of the dangers it presents, and to suggest a path to recovery. This book examines the causes of changes in the English vocabulary. It discusses a variety of verbal solecisms, vulgarisms, and infelicities generally.

Mark Halpern

1: The Question of Change in Language; 2: How Language is Studied Today; 3: Linguistic Authority: Rules, Dictionaries, and Teaching; 4: Descriptivist, Prescriptivist, and Linguistic Activist; 5: The Eskimo Snow Vocabulary Controversy-A Case Study; 6: A People's Linguistics; 7: Restoring Rhetoric to Its Throne; 8: Decadence and Diseases of Language; 9: Plagiarism and Misquotation: the Use of Others' Thoughts and Words; 10: What is To Be Done?; APPENDIX A: Linguistics as a Science; APPENDIX B: Eskimo-Language Terms for Snow and Ice; APPENDIX C: AI and the Golem project - the reverse-engineering twins; APPENDIX D: Notes on Chomsky and the Chomskyan literature; APPENDIX E: A Language of Mathematics? A Proof of Programs?; APPENDIX F: The Principal Players Identified; APPENDIX G: What is A 'Foreign Term'?