LANGUAGE AND SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS
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loginI have written this book for the general reader—general reader in the sense that he may be a specialist in some other subject, but new to the field of linguistic inquiries. I have therefore tried to start from scratch and to avoid going into technicalities whenever the same thing can be said in plain English. But you who are specialists in other subjects are well aware that you cannot go into a subject seriously without using a minimum of technical terms and symbols. As recently as in 1942, the late Professor Joshua Whatmough, author of Language, a Modern Synthesis (London, 1956), used to complain in seminar groups, "Why do they have to use that damn word phoneme}" But soon afterwards he not only started to use the word himself, but also insisted on the classically correct form of the adjective phonematic instead of the more commonly used form phonemic. So I felt free to go ahead and use the term phoneme and even devote a whole chapter to it in a book for the general reader. Thus one thing led to another and from phonemes I had to go into morphophonemes, but'before the book got completely out of hand I had to draw the line somewhere and used such words as sememe only when quoting from other writers. There may have been some slight loss in accuracy when a technical formulation is phrased in plain words, but, as my teacher of mathematics once s<ud, better say something less rigorously and be sure that the message gets across than give it in absolutely correct form and be sure to be mis-understood or not understood at all.
