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By Domenico Pacitti This
confused and confusing book marks Riccardo Ambrosini's umpteenth
unsuccessful attempt to fulfil what appears to be a frustrated
lifelong ambition to make some sort of original contribution to
linguistics. Mr Ambrosini has in fact notched up over 250
publications, most of which are boringly repetitive, none of which
seem to contain anything that is genuinely new and all of which
together suggest a kind of intellectual impotence. The title implies a novel
perspective on natural languages as formal representations of
knowledge but the book offers nothing of the sort. The reader is
instead swamped with a deluge of linguistic data that together add
up to little more than an untidy and jumbled re-arrangement of
known information. Part of the confusion may be
explained by the impression that Mr Ambrosini lacks genuine direct
knowledge of most of the 219 languages and language groups he
refers to and that he has rather culled, collated or summarised
"second-hand" information, at times imperfectly. For
example, on pages 58 and 59 his examples of transcribed Chinese
reveal ignorance of the elementary changing tonal features of the
negative, which foreign students of Chinese learn in their first
few weeks of study. Mr Ambrosini's ignorance of basic Chinese
tones is confirmed in subsequent nonsensical examples. Yet,
curiously, Chinese appears to be one of Mr Ambrosini's favourite
languages to quote. This is perhaps best seen in the
light of the traditional Italian academic need to appear highly
erudite at all costs. Such writing often involves referring to
authors one has not read or understood, concepts of which one has
no direct knowledge and languages one has never studied purely in
order to impress the reader. The basic idea is that if the reader
cannot understand grotesquely complex sentences then that must be
on account of his own failing and inferior intelligence. However,
careful readings usually show that such grotesque complexity and
erudite references together mask the author's own ignorance.
Needless to say, the resulting loss of common sense and clarity
can be quite remarkable. The following typical sentence on
pages 32-33, for example, illustrates Mr Ambrosini's aversion to
full stops: "Tuttavia,
in un quadro pur così complesso, alcuni tratti depongono a favore
dell'ipotesi di un proto-afro-asiatico, tra i quali: il vocalismo
è composto in assoluta prevalenza da a, i, u;
le radici di tutte le parole sono formate da un numero fisso di
consonanti, che, come vedremo, sono due in camitico - secondo lo
schema fonologico che si ritiene quello originario
dell'afro-asiatico - , tre in semitico - ove le radici bilittere
originarie hanno teso ad ampliarsi in trilittere ed inversamente
alcune radici sono solo apparentemente bilittere, perché derivano
da radici trilittere di fasi precedenti del semitico; il femminile
è formato con l'aggiunta del suffisso -t; per il fenomeno
della "polarità" la desinenza del plurale femminile,
anch'essa in -t, viene usata con i plurali di sostantivi
maschili e, assai più raramente, la desinenza del plurale
maschile viene usata per il plurale di sostantivi femminili;
prefissi, infissi e suffissi svolgono funzioni ben determinate
nella coniugazione del verbo; sono distinte le forme di maschile e
femminile sia nella seconda e nella terza persona del verbo (ma
questa distinzione, nelle lingue dove è rimasta, è conservata
solo al singolare, mentre al plurale non si fa più distinzione di
genere grammaticale nelle seconde e nelle terze persone, oltre
che, ovviamente, nelle prime nelle quali, come nella prima
singolare, non c'è mai stata) sia nei pronomi personali
corrispondenti (tra i quali sono suffissati con -k molti di
quelli di seconda persona)." While it is no doubt true that it
is difficult to teach an old dog new tricks, the following advice
from Bertrand Russell could profitably be considered by Mr
Ambrosini and Italian academics generally: "There
are some simple maxims which I think might be commended to writers
of expository prose. First: never use a long word if a short word
will do. Second: if you want to make a statement with a great many
qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate
sentences. Third: do not let the beginning of your sentence lead
the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the
end." Given
Mr Ambrosini's apparent interest in the Orient, he might find the
following succinct formulation attributed to Confucius more
palatable: "It is enough that one's language gets the point
across". But that, of course, presupposes that one has a
point to get across in the first place. Mr Ambrosini recently retired from a senior post in linguistics at the University of Pisa's faculty of modern languages where his long career included two terms as faculty dean. Note: This review was first published by JUST Book Reviews on July 9 2003. |
