Richard McDorman Essay Series Hailed by the Media

MIAMI, June 4 /PRNewswire/ -- West Virginia native and long-time Miami resident Richard E. McDorman has published a four-part essay series through Amazon Digital Services.

This historical essay reviews the development of the art and science of grammar and philosophical views toward language among the Ancient Greeks. Although the early Greek writers, including Homer and Hesiod, commented on language (for example, in the Iliad Homer referred to the Miletians and other Ionians as "barbarophonoi," literally, “foreign speaking”), it was not until the fifth century B.C. that the explicit study of language emerged in Ancient Greece when rhetoric arose as a profession.

This critical essay examines the effects of the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993), and its progeny on the criminal justice system at both the federal and state levels. While Daubert addressed the admissibility of scientific evidence in a civil action, the role of scientific evidence is most crucial in the criminal courts, where the testimony of an ‘expert’ in some or another scientific field frequently is the difference between conviction and acquittal.

The renowned historical linguist Hans Henrich Hock once commented that, for reasons that are not well understood, there sometimes appear "curious gaps" in the bilabial slot of languages' series of obstruent phonemes.