A Short History of Linguistics
by R. H. Robins
Linguistics were crucial to establishing a role for computing in the humanities. During World War II, a Czech refugee, linguist Roman Jakobson, ran across Norbert Weiner’s cybernetics while studying in a program for French-speaking refugee professors set up at the New School. In that program, he recruited Claude Lévi-Strauss for a seminar on computing and the structure of things. That seminar transformed French, and eventually European, academe.
For my purposes, Robins’s short history leans a little too heavily in to Greece and Rome and hurries through the Twentieth Century, partly because Robins supposes that students will already know the recent ideas. Saussure gets about three pages, and that’s not really enough for me to follow. Still, this volume did what I asked it to do.