Reviews for Threshold 1990

The average rating for Threshold 1990 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-02-17 00:00:00 Jerry Hawkers A book of anti-liguistics by an unknown author with no credentials in language study from a vanity press attacking the prominent linguists and all they stand for. This should be fun! I despise the grammar grumpiness of William Safire and prescriptive pedants of that *ilk. So I should hate, or at least be *disinterested in, this book which not only endorses prescriptive grammar but goes so far as to argue that linguistics is not a science at all. Yet I am *reticent to do so. I will briefly *share with you that I think he *arguably makes some good points and I greatly enjoyed reading it. This may have caused a *quantum jump in my thoughts on language and opened a *brave new world for me. The author writes that he is "preaching to the choir -- to readers who are already in sympathy to my views ... I find it impossible to imagine any other kind of reader picking the book up, sticking with it to the end, and allowing [himself or *herself] to be won over by it." Maybe he has an unusually inactive imagination, or else he means something different by the word imagine than I do. In either case, I did pick it up, read every word, including the appendices and end notes, and was at least partially won over. He isn't as strict a prescritivist as he initially appears to be. And, in my opinion, the extreme descriptivist positions he attacks aren't really held by very many. Despite this being a vanity press, it seemed well edited, perhaps by the author himself. I found very few typos, and it was well organized except for an unexpected digression into the antisemitism of H.P. Lovecraft. * Asterisks denote usages that the author dislikes.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-04-24 00:00:00 Paul Boyers Mark Halpern took an introduction to linguistics class and a class on Old English as a college student many years before; he doesn't mention in this book, whether or not he knows any languages other than English. Yet he feels competent enough to write a whole book attacking academic linguistics for disdaining linguistic prescriptivism, and thus contributing to the degradation of the English language. He attributes this disdain to the linguists' left-wing and progressive bias. I was reminded of the claim on a Russian left-wing site that Russia's transition to capitalism in the early 1990s has been stripping the Russian language of noun and verb morphology.