| Current mood: |  depressed |
Am mildly amused and rather horrified and terribly embarrassed that Daniel Everett himself has picked up on my throwaway phrase "Borgesian fantasist". I could try accusing Mr Libermann of abusing the privileges of private e-mail if I hadn't bandied similar slack-jawed amazement around in several other places off my own BAT (a winged mammal). So deep apologies again to Professor Everett, but of course it is completely... er... contrary to expectations. (And oh god it would be such a wonderful Borges story!) It is literally unbelievable, and Everett seems to have acknowledged this repeatedly in his quest to be believed. I'm a staunch defender of the orthodoxy and always a rubbisher of the Sapir-Whorfian, so one of the first things to do on seeing this sort of amazing claim is to worry about other well-known expositors, Mead and Turnbull and Chagnon... but the way Everett describes it just doesn't sound like them. It doesn't sound ideologically pegged, it doesn't sound linguistically credulous, it... I don't know what it is. But worlds come crashing down. Everything I thought was part of my Sprachgefühl is wrong.
Couple this with the despair at the fact that I can't come up with anything original about the logic of grammar. I think I'm fifty years too early. We have no idea what's going on. No idea at all.
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entangledbank) wrote,
