Metalinguistics

Oh, another idea I thought up last night: metalinguistics. If you ask someone "What's interesting and unique about the language you speak?", they probably won't be able to give you an answer. But suppose you wanted to study certain differences between, say, Japanese and French. You get a group of Japanese linguists and a group of French linguists and ask them to study a third language, say, "Lower Panjobo", the language of the great hamster-herding tribes of the wilds of Darkest Pittsburgh. You study their respective papers, noting what they think is interesting about Lower Panjobo, and gain insight into the interesting things about their own languages.

July 18, 1996

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