Re: Plausibility Check


Nathan Sanders schrieb:

Failing to recognize when success occurs doesn't invalidate the
success, it just means you are too stupid or too arrogant to know, let
alone admit, that you've been proven to be wrong. And to be a kook.

I certainly answered all your questions. It's all kept in the archive,
so I don't have to repeat myself.

No, these are not the main objections against your lunatic fantasy.
The fact that you don't even comprehend what the actual objections are
is a perfect demonstration of just how out of touch you are with the
reality of language and of the arguments you face.

Those are the main objections. Yours were different. You told
me a scientific thesis requires systematic work, and there must
be a corpus. Well, I proceed in a systematic manner, following
my four laws of Magdalenian, and this year I mined 350 more
Magdalenian words. All in the archive.

The true arguments are (among others):

* no human language operates the way your fantasy does, with all words
being the same size and permutations corresponding to related meanings

When you speak about all human languages you refer to
the human languages you know, or we know. We don't
know the human languages that have been spoken
15,000 years ago, so your above statement lacks a basis.

* there is no regularity or predictive power to your fantasy; given a
particular fantasy "word", it is impossible to know in advance how any
specific descendant word would be pronounced

Nevertheless I have a method of following hypothetical words
through their evolution and development by pronouncing them
silently, without giving voice, over and over again. When I give
voice, the phonetical system of the brain sets in and takes
control, but when I pronounce the words silently they can shift,
sooner or later. Seems this method is new.

Meaningless made-up jargon. Your obvious ignorance of the field is
preventing you from using standard terminology, so you are hiding
behind a cloud of obfuscatory words pulled from your uneducated ass.

No, precise terminology, borrowed from biology. I explained
at length that I compare evolution in biology and linguistics,
and so that borrowing is legitimate. even the more so as
I underwstand - and explain - language as a basic feature
of life.

Which is not how language operates. Semantic shift is a well-known
phenomenon in language change, with a wide variety of possible shifts
that even in a short time period can produce radically different,
seemingly unrelated meanings: for example, nice/science,
dismal/journey, paradise/dough, and countless other sets of words with
cognate morphemes that no longer have any obvious connection at all.
With the time period you are considering, the shifts grow more
numerous and more drastic.

I also adressed the problem of semantic shift; all in the archive.
Here a new aspect. I explained in this thread (and before in
the fall of 2004) how human made things and words are related.
Conventional paleolinguistics leads back to the era of early
agriculture that caused a major upheaval of culture, while
the earlier periods, Aurigniacian / Gravettian / Magdalenian
and partly also the Azilian can be considered homogenous
on the material level. Major shifts occur in times of material
changes, and of course today with the rise of information
technology and a global society on the basis of far-reaching
technological facilities. You can't simply apply the speed of
word shifting in our time to the one in the Magdalenian.

No, one can't assume such things! There is no evidence whatsoever
that words in human languages have consistently gotten longer over
time. Indeed, many historical changes result in shortening of words:
syncope, apocope, truncation/clipping, cluster simplification, loss of
codas, lenition to zero, coalescence, monophthongization, etc.

Of course one can asssume that early language made use of
very short words. Also the first words a baby or toddler says
are short.

If you had even a minimal exposure to work in historical linguistics,
you would already know this.

Ever listened to a toddler?

And here we see more of your linguistic ignorance, rearing its head in
abuse of (embarrassingly simple) terminology. "Letters" are used in
writing, "sounds" are used in speech. Your beloved Magdalenians most
certainly did not have "letters".

I revive the old meaning of letters as phonems, in use still
in the 19th century. The letters we are using were invented
as phonems of the Latin tongue. They still hold as phonems
in Italian, apart from ge gi ce ci, and partly in other languages
as well, although they fail in English, because you are
chewing on them poor vowels, and you often pronounce
consonants not as they are written. I use letters in the original
sense as phonems of Latin, they are to be pronounced that
way, so I can speak of letters in the old sense of phonemes.

Yours do not bring us further. I daresay that in fact, your imbecilic
ideas are so completely removed from actual linguistics that they do
nothing resembling the action of bringing at all. More like imploding
or melting.

Actual linguistics have serious shortcomings. Telling by
sci.lang one gets the impression that all linguists care
about are that fetish of phonems. Or rather fonems, as
you can't even discern PH and F - a problem of neuronal
wiring, comparable to the Japanese who can't discern
between L and R (they need an intense seminary of
three weeks to recognize that there actually _is_ a
difference between L and R).

All evidence to the contrary. And I mean *all*. To wit:

As
a teenager I asked myself: What is language?, and in
1974/75 I gave the following answer:

Language is the means of getting help, support
and understanding from those we depend upon
in one way or another --- and every means of
getting help, support and understanding may be
called language, on whatever level of life it occurs

So you can type words such as imbecilic, but you can't
point out what is wrong about my definition of language.

Franz Gnaedinger

.

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