Re: Universality of Interjections?

phippsmartin@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
> I'm not talking about actual researchers. I'm talking about regular
> contributors to this group. I've seen people here claim that _only_
> linguistic data is used to determine if languages are related, that
> known historical migrations are not taken into account. Nonsense! One

Cite historical linguistics work (that is considered valid today) that
uses as data information about migrations.

> poster on this group went so far as to claim that the term "Germanic"
> is only used by linguists refering to the language group, that it is
> not used by anthropologists to refer to Germanic people themselves.
> Again, nonsense. The same poster claimed that language drift always

Don't use technical terms -- "drift" -- that you have never even been
introduced to.

> occurs naturally, that languages are never imposed on conquered people;
> presumably native people from Mexico to Argentina just decided on their
> own that they wanted to learn Spanish, that there weren't any

How many "native people from Mexico to Argentina" "learned" Spanish?

Did they go to schools set up by the Conquistadores to do so?

> institutional incentives encouraging them to do so. Ridiculous. And,
> no, it wasn't anybody on this group who told me about areal
> linguistics: I went and did a search on my own to find out about it
> after being told by people on this group that the only way that two
> languages can be related is genetically (which, granted, is what actual
> linguists are refering to by default when they claim that two languages
> are related).

You still don't get it.

What makes a language area is the very fact that UNrelated languages
come to share certain distinctive characteristics. They don't thereby
turn related.

> I'm sorry if the point I was trying to make didn't get through to you
> (Nathan): simply put, my point is that any researcher should have at
> least a passing familiarity with disciplines related to his or her own.
> Otherwise, yes, it is quite possible for a self described expert to
> spout utter nonsense time and time again.

Motes and beams? Pots and kettles? When you, a self-proclaimed language
teacher, have learned something of the related discipline of
linguistics, then maybe you'll be able to contribute something to this
newsgroup worth reading.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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