REPORT OF THE SIXTH ANNUAL ROUND TABLE MEETING ON LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE TEACHING EDITED BY RUTH HIRSCH WEINSTEIN GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS WASHINGTON, D. C. Copyright 1955 GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS THE INSTITUTE OP LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS SCHOOL OF FOREIGN SERVICE GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY Price: $2.50 a copy / m10M time to time The Institute of Languages and Linguistics, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, publishes monographs intended to contribute to the discipline of linguis- tics and the teaching of languages. Manuscripts should be addressed to L. E. Dostert, Editor Monograph Series on Languages and Linguistics 1719 Massachusetts Avenue, N. W. Washington 6, D. C. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page FOREWORD vi INTRODUCTION Reverend Frank L. Fadner, S.J., Regent, School of Foreign Service 1 L. E. Dostert, Director, Institute of Languages and Lin- guistics 8 Ruth Hirsch Weinstein, Institute of Languages and Lin- guistics 9 I. APPLIED LINGUISTICS AND THE PREPARATION OF TEACHING MATERIAL Some Procedures in an Intensive Language Course 10 Discussion 20 Textbook Materials for Teaching German Pronunciation... 22 Discussion 31 The Preparation of the FSI Spanish Materials: A Case History 33 Sample A to F 42 Discussion 47 Phonetic Training as an Aid to Language Learning 50 Discussion 52 The Use of Phonemic Analysis in the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language 58 Discussion 61 II. THE TERMINOLOGY OF LINGUISTICS: A PROB- LEM IN COMMUNICATION 65 III. PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATION Introductory Remarks 77 Problems of Literary Translation 80 Translation as a Tool of Research 87 TABLE OF CONTENTS Machine Translation to Date 101 Approach to Mechanical Translation 114 Discussion 119 IV. MEANING AND LANGUAGE STRUCTURE A Discrimination among Synonyms of the Word 'Meaning'.. 123 Discussion 133 Meaning and Hypostasis 134 Discussion 140 Semantic Considerations in Grammar 141 Discussion 150 The Varieties of Meaning 158 V. ADVENTURES AMONG LANGUAGE TEACHERS AND LINGUISTS 165 Appendix 1. Program of the Sixth Annual Round Table Meeting .. 173 Appendix 2. Membership of the Sixth Annual Round Table Meeting. 174 Appendix 3. Index of Speakers 178 Appendix 4. An Iterative Translation Test 179 FOREWORD The Sixth Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Lan- guage Teaching was held in the spring of 1955 at Washington, D. C. This Monograph publishes in their entirety the papers read at the sessions along with selected excerpts from the ensuing discussions. In this way we make available in permanent form to an even wider audience the contributions of all who participated. Those who have sponsored these meetings through the years are gratified at the consistently rising number of linguists and language teachers who have attended. That trend was continued at the Sixth Annual Meeting. It is a pleasure to extend the thanks of all of us to those who col- laborated to make the meeting profitable as well as to those whose sponsorship made the meeting possible. RUTH HIRSCH WEINSTEIN, Editor Introduction THE REVEREND FRANK L. FADNER, S. J., Executive Assistant to the Regent, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, made the following welcoming remarks: Once again I deem it a great privilege, in the name of the Reverend Edward B. Bunn, President of Georgetown University, and on behalf of the Reverend Edmund A. Walsh, Founder and Regent of the School of Foreign Service, to welcome you at this our Sixth Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Teaching. As I look at this group of enthusiastic scientists gathered around the discussion table—each prepared to make an honest contribution in the several sectors of that most human science of language—I am reminded of a notorious convention of linguists who met in the city of Moscow from January 24 to 27,1949.1 am referring to the scientific session which convened under the auspices of the Institute of Lan- guage and Thought to do honor to the memory of Nikolay Yakov- levich Marr, dead by that time for some fifteen years, and, in his lifetime, the recognized founder of what Marxist linguists of the U.S.R.R. chose to call the "new materialist teaching in language". With but few timid exceptions the delegates to the linguistic congress of 1949 swung incense at the icon of the man who, following the gospel of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, had made the remarkable dis- covery that language is a means of communication! At this famous gathering Marr, the pioneer of Soviet linguistics, was generally praised for his "genuinely materialistic theory of the origin of language", for his theory that languages and changes in language were the creation of "the labor activity of a human collec- tive". For years the "new linguistics" of N. Y. Marr had been recog- nized as the official linguistic doctrine of the U.S.R.R. Students of language in the Soviet Union had taken for granted Marr's proposi- tion that language is a superstructure resting on and reflecting the social and economic base of the human collective that makes use of it. Accordingly, following the "logic" of the trichotomy of inverted Hegelianism, when that social and economic base was negated or con- tradicted by a violent revolution, then the language superstructure 2 LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE TEACHING was by necessity also radically changed. In other words, just as is the case with all other things in Lenin's universe which is made up ex- clusively of matter in motion, the development of language, too, was a matter of progression by leaps, by explosions. What could be more logical, therefore, than that the new linguistics of the Soviet period of the antithesis in Russia, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, should present a contradiction of all pre-revolutionary linguistic science, dubbed "idealist"? In his officially approved crusade against bourgeois ideology, Marr had led the game of setting up and knocking down straw men, when he condemned the old historical-comparative methodology as connoting the racism of Hitler's fascism, and Anglo- American imperialism. And so N. Y. Marr, the dean of Russia's linguistic scientists, had long carried the day with his proposition that all languages are class languages. "Language has always been of a class nature", declared the Marxist Marr; so that, to put it more concretely, the "Georgian feudal language is more closely related to the Armenian feudal language than either of them to the popular language of its own country". There is not, nor should there be, such a thing as a national language. The concept is simply a dead one for a revolutionary Marxist. With a naivete1 that put to shame the whimsies and the false etymologies of the glorious old armchair philologist of a bygone day, Admiral Shish- kov, who in his time was accused of wanting to find the Russian lan- guage in the Garden of Eden and who suggested that the very name of the gods of classical antiquity were Slavonic in their origin (he appropriately derived the name of Neptune from the phrase ne potonu —I shall not drown), N. Y. Marr, high priest of the science of language in the Soviet Union, became renowned for his Japhetic theory. This theory, with a grand mipris for history and word meaning, affirmed that all languages originate from four elements, the mystic syllables Sal, Ber, Yon and Rosh, which were pulled out of the air as the basis for the fantastic procedure of linguistic analysis that followed. Thus the job of the disciples of Marr became the game of comparing cab- bages and kings. Completely emancipated, the Soviet scientist now had merely to track down these four elements, with their numerous sound shifts and modifications, in the words of human language. His task was completed when he found such inevitably common elements in languages as disparate as Georgian and Chinese, Latin and Arabic, INTRODUCTION 3 Chuvash, Turkish, and Basque. Small wonder that as time went on, the group of so-called Japhetic languages in which Marr had first in- terested himself, came to constitute a huge language empire, since it was his belief that these languages represented the common linguistic material from which the world's single glottogonic process had begun. Indeed, this whole process was to end where it had started—with a single common language for mankind. Even the great Stalin himself, at the Sixteenth Party Congress, had been intrigued and expressed himself in favor of the fusion of all languages into one general world language after the victory of socialism. But, as I have already hinted, there were a few timid exceptions to the general chorus of eulogy sung in honor of Marr at this Moscow agape. There were a few students of language in necessarily obscure corners who had not mounted the bandwagon as enthusiastic sub- scribers to the officially blessed linguistic line of the revered N. Y. Marr. There were those condemned "reactionaries" and "idealists" who felt that the great mentor's scorn for the disciplines of grammar and history was generally responsible for the chaotic, stagnant state of Soviet linguistics, and the unsatisfactory state of even the ele- mentary study of language in the Union. Perhaps significantly, on the eve of a new imperialistic venture undertaken by the Soviet Union, the Korean War, on May 9, 1950, the official party organ Pravda announced that two of its pages each week would be opened to articles discussing questions of linguistics in the U.S.S.R. Apparently assured of official encouragement, some thirteen bright lights on the liuguistic scene published articles in the columns of the paper. First to appear were the scathing words of A. Chikobava who set about the task of smashing the idol of N. Y. Marr. Seven of the articles that followed were highly critical of Comrade Marr while five sought to defend the memory and doctrine of the pioneer of the "new, materialist teachings on language".