Semantics without native intuition
William John Samarin · TSpace (University of Toronto) · 1974
The study of preliterate languages has been dominated by practical considerations and by a limited number of academic concerns. It was the necessity of communicating with peoples without a written tradition that led, for example, to the writing of grammars and, to a far lesser extent, dictionaries. Christian missionaries have not been the only ones to contribute to our present knowledge of these languages, some now extinct, but their works made up the bulk of linguistic literature up to the emergence of descriptive linguistics (for a review see, for example, DOKE and COLE 1961 and WONDERLY and NIDA 1963 ) . There are still enough such languages and enough peopLe. who have to learn them to justify serious discussion about the problems and strategies in learning languages for which there are only poor helps or none at all. The ideal field manual to deal with the perennial problems (learning phonology, grammar, and lexicon) has not yet been written (although HEALEY 1971, GUDSCHINSKY 1967, LARSON and SMALLEY 1969, and SAMARIN 1967 make contributions). Even when this book has been written, there will come the time to revise it in response to technological developments. (The tape recorder, although no longer an exotic instrument, has not been exploited by field workers to anywhere near its full potential. Yet it has been badly used by many).