Introduction

Abstract

Although a great amount of valuable work has been done in the field of phonemics with regard to hitherto unrecorded languages, one may well wonder whether the accent has not been placed too predominantly on these at the expense of the so-called culture languages, i.e. “the, language of a society that has a literary tradition in written form”, to use Gordon M. Messing’s phrase in “Structuralism and Literary Tradition”¹) In the same article the author sets out to show up the fallacy of the assumption that the same criteria in describing languages of the one category can be applied to a description of a culture language. As an illustration of this confusion Messing points to Robert A. Hall’s treatment of Modern French as if it were Eskimo.²)