The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.
Initial work is on period research where the historical markers are absolutely non-negotiable. Once that is established, a writer can take creative liberties in terms of chronology to suit the story.
It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.
When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what's left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.
It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.
I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.
How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.
We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.
The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.
The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements.