Calling Professor Chomsky

Don't go away, Professor Chomsky; your question is at the bottom. ldd

A Book About Language, With No Phoneme Unturned (nyt)

Mr. Dickson, down here on the outback the Gulf of Mexico, we await like birds in a nest for you smart-as-hell NYC boys to tell us what to think and how to write.

Imagine our dismay when you write a gaga article about a British Elmer Gantry of linguistics who breezes into NY and wows you with the hot tip that Portuguese Pidgin has replaced Indo-European in the linguistics racket.

I think Mr. Crystal's bushy wild-man beard seduced you. You NYC boys are pushovers for even vestigial marks of the Nobel Savage, especially one coming from the Mother Country.

Meanwhile, we Gulf-of-Mexico hillbilly prescriptive grammarians--the ones who know extant rules and naively apply them--must mark your departures from Standard English, which your bosses at the NYT purport to exemplify in its pages. I am sending this rat-out to Mr. Keller, who--now that somebody there finally had the guts to fire Judith Miller when he didn't--is supposed to be in charge of the quality of writing in the paper, one hears.

I shall mount your piece in my Grammargrinch.blogspot.blog. It's that bad.

lee drury de cesare 15316 Gulf Boulevard 802 Madeira Beach, FL 33708

Wait! I am not finished.

Mr. Chomsky, give us your assessment of your competition's lucubrations: those of Mr. Crystal. Is Indo-European out and Pidgin in? We need linguistic liturgy on this matter in our grammar Dogpatch. Also tell us what you think of Alan Dershowitz's demand that President Carter debate him on calling the conditions in the Jewish settlements "apartheid."
Thank you.

An outback fan,

lee drury de cesare 727-398-4142

By PAUL DICKSON Published: December 18, 2006

After laying out all the conventional wisdom on sign language (that is, it is no more than a system of sophisticated gesturing and not a real language at all; that there is just one sign language)comma he declares all of it wrong.

You need a comma after the close of parenthesis for an introductory verbal phrase. The "after" phrase is adverbial with a gerund phrase as object. It that modifies "declares."

For example he tells us that every language spoken evolved from the large assortment of sound units of which the human voice is capable, but that no language uses all the sound units available to it.

The "for example" is a sentence modifier and requires a comma after it. You could transfer the redundant comma after "capable," which splits compound dependent clauses.

His evidence is that English has (in some accents) 44 sound units, Rotokas in the Pacific Islands has only 11 but !Xu in Southern Africa emits 141 different sound units when spoken.

The comma after "unit" marks a rotten-to-the-core comma splice. That's a grammar felony. You need a comma after "ll" for a compound sentence.

If there is a quibble to be made it is that Mr. Crystal occasionally seems to exceed his own speed limit and discuss key issues too quickly.

A comma goes after "made" for an introductory adverbial clause.

The question asked by anxious parents every day about which is the better way to teach a child to read — phonics or whole-word approaches — is addressed in a couple of paragraphs, noting that this debate has raged since the early 19th century. 42-word blowsy sentence

The comma after "paragraphs" is redundant: that participial phrase is restrictive.

Edit: "Anxious parents ask whether phonics or whole-word is the better method. The author notes that this battle has raged since the early 19th century. 11- and 13-word equals 24.

Then there is his balanced but all-too-brief presentation of the centuries-old battle between the advocates of prescribing grammar and usage versus those who simply describe what is actually being spoken and written.

There is no battle. The "prescribing" folks want to use current best English on the market in the history of language. The actually-being-spoken free-spirit layabouts say "to hell with the rules. I can't be bothered to learn them. I can use dangling modifiers if I don't know any better and write for the NYTimes, to boot." The which has become one of the many newspapers that let grammar and punctuation go to hell in its pages in breezy, illiterate apercus like yours.

Again, this is something he moves through as quickly as one can turn impact from a noun to a verb.

This exit sentence makes no sense. Not making sense is un-American.

Time and again a point is made and illustrated with a fact or anecdote that perfectly drives it home.

Your major style affliction is galloping passive-verbitis. Run this piece through the grammar checker to see how severe your condition is. "Crystal illustrates a fact or anecdote..." You suffer from wordiness as well.