Posts contrassegnato dai tag ‘Columbia University’

Segmenti per #AndreMartinet

Pubblicato: 3 luglio 2013 in comunicazione, personaggi, Senza categoria
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#AndreMartinet #Martinet

André Martinet/13 – Reconstruction is dynamic

Pubblicato: 8 Maggio 2013 in comunicazione, personaggi
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economieConversazione con André Martinet

What is your position in respect to Leonard Bloomfield?

Bloomfield has a number of things which are commendable and which Europeans should know, because his work is not very wide, it is not very broad minded, but it is pretty good, in the sense that he sticks to realities and there is no fooling around. A bit too narrow, but after all it is all right as a beginning. Of course you have to have good people who go beyond that, you have in America a number of people like that, like Hockett.

So, that was the contact with America, and the contact was, how could I say… It is very difficult to say. I might have some people… I actually had a number of students who were very much interested and who wrote things, they wrote dissertations, that sort of things… but it didn’t last too long: just eight years and I had to leave Columbia University.

Then you went back to France…

I went back to France and it took me a long time before I could get established because, here again, people didn’t like me, because at that time people didn’t like Americans. French in general were, how could I say? jealous. Before the Americans became the people who were imitated the world over, the French had had their period and they were being replaced by the Americans. And therefore they resented it. And I was, when I came back from New York, I was branded “the American”, which was not a pleasant nickname. My daughter, she went to school and she was branded “the American” and suffered from it. The result was that she left France and went to Sweden, just because she had never felt at home in France. Now she’s gone back to France. She lives in Provence and Provence is different. Provence is generally nicer than France in general. I’m just telling you her story, because it is very much like mine. Her reception in France was difficult.

But I finally got through, just because at a certain period I was very popular, my teaching was the only teaching in linguistics for ten years. I was the only one who came with some sort of message. And that’s the period which proceeded the appearance of Eléments de linguistique générale. That book sold a very large amount of copies. It was just amazing, the number of copies. I bought two houses in Provence! And the book was translated into Korean, Russian, Italian, Spanish, etc..

So, you don’t think the problem in Paris stems from differing terminology or from the new concepts you proposed…

Yes… Well, of course the problem had started in New York, because I gave the New York classes in both comparative linguistics and general linguistics. I had to give comparative linguistics and that’s why, when I came back from New York, I could write that book, Économie, which was based upon my teaching on the Indo-European classes in New York. Descriptive linguistics in New York, at Columbia University, could be taken over by a colleague of mine, a well known man, Greenberg, and there was no serious competition, but I was not really… at Columbia people didn’t think of me as the one who was the only man with the ability to direct the work in descriptive linguistics. I was there as a possible director, but I was not the only one. I was more interested and more interesting in comparative linguistics.

You might be interested in my book Des steppes aux ocèans, where I present the whole problem in a rather accessible way, because it resulted from two classes I gave at the École des Hautes Études which were asked for by my normal students, because they didn’t know anything about comparative linguistics.

So, I gave my first class in comparative linguistics and some years later I gave another class which improved upon the first class. And the whole thing was picked up by a friend of mine and I finally wrote a book from the second notes, improving upon many points, etc.. It is meant for a public who knows nothing about comparative linguistics and it goes very far, because I present my reconstruction of Indo-European.

My reconstruction is different from the others, because mine is dynamic. I’m not presenting forms which are “the” Indo-European forms. I say: “at  a certain point Indo-European had that form”. I operate with the evolution of the language, not with the projection of specific forms on a screen, which is ridiculous. There is not such a language in the world. The world changes: no reason to say that Indo-European was Indo-European, let’s say, five thousand years B.C. . Strangely enough I was practically the first to do so and people don’t like me for that, because I was not supposed to do that.

When I came back to Paris, they said “Ok, he comes out, he has a reputation”, because I was that guy managing a different world and that played a role, I had written reviews of many books and people were afraid of my reviews. I was not nasty, but of course a man who has a journal and racks a number of reviews in journals may influence… make a difference.

People expected me to be a descriptivist. And as such, I should not have bothered with reconstructing Indo-European linguistics. And for some reason I didn’t meddle with that, except that my students asked for it, they wanted it. Why should I have refused it? I wasn’t very much interested. I had written that book Economie des changements phonetiques and people said “we want more of that”.

Of course the editor responsible for the Bulletin de la Societé de Linguistique said: “No, we don’t want to write a review of that book”, which is very nasty. I had a call from the girl who was chief-editor and she explained to me that, considering the fact that I was a very well known linguist, what I wrote could not be recommended in the journal. Why not? Just like that. What could I say? Then I sent them an article based upon one of my theories, that is the existence in protoindoeuropean of penalised consonants. It explains a number of things and it explains, for example, the end of cum in latin, which is not known, because, in comparison, it is the same form as in germanic [ge], which again I managed to explain, because that had been suggested before.

It doesn’t work, because the change of [k] to [g] can be accepted only under the condition of Verner’s Law and not initally. But, as a matter of fact, in Umbrian, a language spoken around here*, they put the [ga] at the end of the word and in latin you have cases like mecum and tecum, where you have it after or before.

That is the reason for which there is hesitation, there. In Germanic you have to reckon with postposed forms, and you are going to have to explain the [g] insteaad of the [k] and a shift to the beginning when it became a permanent element of the conjugation of verbs. For example, the status you have in German with ge-: gefallen. It became morphology, as people call it, you see.

*San Marino, luogo in cui si è svolta l’intervista

Leggi gli altri post dell’intervista:

André Martinet/1 Communication is our basic relevancy

André Martinet/2 Language articulates what we feel into a succession of items

André Martinet/3 Pregiudizi linguistici

André Martinet/4 Cosa c’è dietro le parole

André Martinet/5 La lingua non è simmetrica

André Martinet/6 A volte le parole non bastano

André Martinet/7 Armonia è economia

André Martinet/8 La Societé Internationale de Linguistique fonctionnelle

André Martinet/9 We don’t care about deep structures

André Martinet/10 L’importanza del punto di vista

André Martinet/11 Naturaliter Sauxurianus

André Martinet/12 Word vs Language

André Martinet/12 – Word vs Language

Pubblicato: 26 aprile 2013 in comunicazione, personaggi
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English: Columbia University sign in subway st...

Conversazione con André Martinet

Do you think your move to the United States helped you in some way to develop your theory and your personality as a linguist?

Not much, you see, because I went there for something very different. I was more or less connected with the International Auxiliary Languages Association. For some reason I had been interested in that and I was with Vendryes in Paris, who had just become a mamber of a committee for agreement, and appointed by a rich American lady belonging to the Vanderbilt family. She was a very rich woman and she became interested in Esperanto. She talked with me about Esperanto and said: “That’s beautiful, why don’t people accept Esperanto?”.

She went around, she wrote to people asking why they didn’t accept Esperanto. For example, she wrote to Otto Jespersen in Denmark. he had made a language like that and he explained to her that Esperanto had serious drawbacks, which is true, of course. The only advantage of Esperanto is that people know it, know that there is something called in that way, whereas they don’t know the other languages. These people tried to solve the problem and I was involved.

So I went to The Hague and to Brussels etc.. I became interested in it just before the war. Then the war came and after the war those people who had retreated to the United States during it had to come to some sort of conclusion on what was to be done and they invited me to direct the work in New York. So, I went there in teh Summer of ’46 and started to work with them and at the end of the Summer they said: “Could you come back?” and I answered: “Well. I’ll see what I can do with Paris, whether I can leave Paris”.

Finally I got to leave and I went back to America, I got back in february and we settled there with my present wife. She wasn’t my wife yet, but as soon as I got the divorce from my first wife, we married in New York. We were in New York when I got two offers, one coming from London to replace Daniel Jones (he liked me very much and all his younger students, who might have been his successors, insisted on my being candidate). So, I had that offer from London and then at the same time I had another offer from Columbia University, which had been incited by Roman Jakobson, because he had had problems with going to America from Europe during the war: he met a strong resistance on the part of the American linguists. They didn’t want any European to go and… All of them were Bloomfieldians and they didn’t want the Europeans to go there with Saussurians ideas. So, well, they said no. And of course Jakobson was not too happy to have such a nasty recption on their part. So he decided to fill American Universities with Europeans.

That was one of the choice possibilities and he made me a very nice offer: full professor with good salary. You know in America you have three possibilities: assistant professor, associate professor, full professor.

i didn’t know what to do. I would have had a job in France, an offer from London, the other from New York. So, my wife was there, my daughter from my first marriage was there and I said: “Which one do you want? Paris, London or New York?”. They answered “New York!”. Just because the food was terrible. In Paris it was not too good and in London it was terrible. You couldn’t get food in London, whereas in New York you had no problems, or few problems. Theoretically you needed cards for sugar, but you could steal all the sugar you wanted from the pubs!

Well, anyway, that was the situation when I went to New York City and I went there as the result of a kind of pressure exerted by Jakobson in order to grab all the chairs in America in favour of the Europeans. So I was, from the start, branded as a nasty European, pinching desirable chairs in America. That was a disadvantage because to some extent we had to launch a new journal, “Word”, of which I really was the editor from the start, from the second number. Therefore there was a conflict between the “Word” people, who were in general “the Europeans” and the “Language” people, who were “the real Americans”.

Leggi gli altri post dell’intervista:

André Martinet/1 Communication is our basic relevancy

André Martinet/2 Language articulates what we feel into a succession of items

André Martinet/3 How to describe a language

André Martinet/4 Choosing words

André Martinet/5 Amalgamations

André Martinet/6 Semiotics

André Martinet/7 Economy

André Martinet/8 La Societé Internationale de Linguistique fonctionnelle

André Martinet/9 We don’t care about deep structures

André Martinet/10 Focus on Communication

André Martinet/11 Naturaliter Sauxurianus

André Martinet/Introduzione – Equilibrio dinamico: è tutto qui

Pubblicato: 6 marzo 2013 in comunicazione, personaggi
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Anteprima dell’esame di laurea: nella hall di un albergo di San Marino André Martinet mi interroga a lungo (e sua moglie prende appunti), per testare le mie conoscenze e, credo, le mie convinzioni sulla linguistica, prima di concedermi l’intervista che gli avevo chiesto per la tesi, come suggerito dal mio relatore, il professor Poli.
E’ chiaro dunque che la mia storia con Martinet all’inizio non fu facile. Prima, tra l’altro, avevo dovuto aspettare qualche mese per l’ok. Poi ci fu l’appuntamento: San Marino, 18 e 19 ottobre 1993, convegno su Louis Hjelmslev. Lì diedi un volto a diverse penne che erano state importanti per la mia formazione culturale e linguistica: conobbi Umberto Eco, Raffaele Simone e, alla fine, lui, lo studioso che mi interessava più di tutti e che avrebbe parlato con me solo se mi avesse giudicato sufficientemente preparata.
L’esame andò bene e tutti e tre, io Martinet e sua moglie, salimmo nella stanza dove alloggiavano, perché il professore era molto stanco (aveva 85 anni) e aveva bisogno di distendersi sul letto. Io mi sedetti in fondo, su una sedia, e feci tutta l’intervista guardando, in primo piano, le piante dei suoi piedi nudi, e poi, dietro, il suo viso contornato da una folta capigliatura canuta, sorretto da due cuscini. Mi morsi idealmente i gomiti per non aver dato retta a un amico giornalista, che mi aveva suggerito di portare con me una macchina fotografica, ma tanto non so se alla fine lui avrebbe accettato di farsi fotografare così.
Il mio rapporto con lui, però, era stato difficile già in precedenza, quando lo conobbi attraverso la sua Sintassi generale, che dovevo studiare per un esame. A casa ne ho due copie. La prima all’inizio mi era così ostica che più volte l’ho lanciata contro il muro del mio studio. Però c’era qualcosa che mi affascinava: a posteriori so che era il concetto di equilibrio dinamico del sistema, secondo cui “i mutamenti vengono interpretati sulla base di una antinomia irriducibile, che contrappone da un lato l’esigenza di chiarezza e precisione, che porta alla moltiplicazione delle unità distintive, dall’altro una tendenza al risparmio di energia, che favorisce l’uso delle unità più frequenti. Alla armonizzazione tra le due pressioni, caratteristiche dell’attività comunicativa umana, si subordina il mutamento. Le deviazioni, dunque, saranno eliminate se funzionano da ostacoli alla reciproca comprensione, ma si tenderà ad accoglierle quando favoriranno la comprensione” (così scrivevo più o meno in un capitolo della mia tesi).
Ecco, io qui ci ho trovato la vita della lingua e per questo ho deciso che la Sintassi generale di Martinet andava affrontata, se necessario anche con le maniere forti, per capirla fino in fondo. Martinet è solidissimo nelle sue argomentazioni, che, per essere seguite e comprese, presuppongono conoscenze atrettanto solide, perché, afferma lui, esistono le scienze della natura, ma anche quelle delle culture.
Risultato: il libro è diventato un campo di battaglia: sottolineature e note, prima a matita e poi a penna, nera e blu, evidenziatori colorati, pagine stropicciate. Così ho comprato una seconda copia, che mi è servita per il ripasso generale, e per presentarmi all’esame.
Il pomeriggio con Martinet è stato da mal di testa: quell’uomo era un fiume in piena di teorie, di ricordi, di studio e di vita. Abbiamo parlato in inglese, lingua che mi era più familiare del francese, e nella quale, ovviamente, lui era perfettamente a suo agio, avendo insegnato per quasi un decennio alla Columbia University. Ne è uscita una lunghissima conversazione, che ho scelto di trascrivere fedelmente nella tesi*, per non perdere la vivacità del suo linguaggio e dei suoi racconti.
All’ultimo convegno sulle #scritturebrevi di Roma ho avuto la piacevole sorpresa di sentirlo citare ripetutamente, mentre ai tempi della laurea avevo avuto l’impressione che Martinet non fosse così al centro dell’interesse accademico. Anche per questo, dopo che Francesca Chiusaroli mi ha fatto riprendere in mano il lavoro, ho pensato che, magari, i suoi racconti e le riflessioni raccolti da me in quel pomeriggio d’autunno e in quell’atmosfera un po’ surreale, potessero stare meglio dentro un blog, piuttosto che sugli scaffali della libreria in mansarda.
Credo che li pubblicherò, domanda per domanda, giorno per giorno… tanto il bello del web è che nessuno è obbligato a leggere ciò che non gli interessa e, soprattutto, che le parole qui non pesano e non ingombrano. Una cosa è certa: non saranno sempre #scritturebrevi 😉

Anche: http://www.scritturebrevi.it/2013/03/06/equilibrio-dinamico-e-tutto-qui/

*Scienze della natura e scienze delle culture, conversazione con André Martinet – Università degli studi di Macerata, Facoltà di Lettere e filosofia, Corso di laurea in lingue e letterature straniere moderne e contemporanee, tesi di laurea in Glottologia e linguistica generale, relatore prof. Diego Poli