March Books 16) Essays on Time-based Linguistic Analysis, by Charles-James N. Bailey

[nwhyte]

Second paragraph of third chapter:There are two obvious reasons why minilectal approaches cannot explain or predict, why the fundamental concept of naturalness (see later) is so vague and shifting, and why linguistics faces something of a philosophical crisis. First, it is clear that explaining and predicting depend on the study of developments

Comments

[alaimacerc]

I've no academic background in linguistics at all, so I'd very much hesitate to tackle this one given your struggles with it, but I'm very curious indeed about the English Purity of Parentage (to put in in the terms someone of this parish once memorably coined) bit

[nwhyte]

In fairness to Bailey, he is much more interested in the Romance elements to English than I am, and spends most of that chapter (and parts of several others) talking about them.

The Celtic substrate theory isn't universally accepted, but both McWhorter and Tolkien argue for it from quite different starting points.