Re: Plausibility Check

In article <1155212896.237838.293950@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Franz Gnaedinger" <frgn@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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.

Unsurprisingly, you have a warped definition of "answer".

Well, I proceed in a systematic manner,

....and of "systematic".

What does your Magdalenian "letter" A systematically correspond to in
Greek? In Russian? In English?

You have never "answered" this question, and you can't, because there
is no systematicity to your fantasy.

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.

We were still human beings 15,000 years ago. Our brains were the
same. Therefore, the null hypothesis should be that our language
operated the same. Without contradictory evidence, there's no basis
to assume otherwise.

* 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

This word indicates that you cannot answer the objection. And the
lack of predictive power is what makes your fantasy a fantasy, and not
a scientific theory. If it isn't scientific, then by definition, it
doesn't belong in sci.lang.

I have a method of following hypothetical words
through their evolution and development by pronouncing them
silently, without giving voice, over and over again.

Then why do you have a distinction between voiced and voiceless sounds
(D versus T, for example)? The only distinguishing feature between
them is voicing (vocal cord vibration).

And of course, no human language is purely voiceless, so you've added
yet another baseless assumption to your fantasy, further removing it
from the reality of actual language.

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

Linguistics is not biology.

I also adressed the problem of semantic shift;

You didn't *solve* it.

You can't simply apply the speed of
word shifting in our time to the one in the Magdalenian.

Indeed, semantic shifts could have happened *faster*, since there was
no literacy to help stabilize the language.

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.

You can assume it, but it's wrong.

Also the first words a baby or toddler says
are short.

Irrelevant. Adult language and child language are radically
different. Did your Magdalenians have no adults?

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

Ever listened to a toddler?

Ever listened to the toddler's parents?

Chicken or egg. In this case, you aren't going back far enough for
child language to be relevant, because the children you are looking at
always had parents with fully developed adult language.

You'd need to go back 100,000 years or more to even get anywhere close
to a time when human ancestors used a communication system more
primitive than language.

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,

Once you reach the 21st century, come back to us. An extra hundred or
so years of studying linguistics just might help you out.

By the way, it's "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.

All sciences do. On Usenet especially, the sciences are plagued by
uneducated kooks peddling fantasies.

Telling by
sci.lang one gets the impression that all linguists care
about are that fetish of phonems.

You have gotten the wrong impression of both sci.lang and of linguists
in general.

Or rather fonems, as
you can't even discern PH and F -

Again, you confuse letters with sounds, something only the stupidest,
or laziest, introductory linguistics students would continue to do
after being corrected numerous times.

a problem of neuronal wiring,

No, a property of the English writing system. It has absolutely
nothing to do with the brain.

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.

I already have. It's "in the archive".

Here's a summary, since I'm feeling generous and haven't given a
linguistics lecture recently because it's summer: your definition is
far too broad, to the point of uselessness. It's like defining
"chemical reaction" as any interaction of matter, on whatever level
matter can interact. Suddenly, in your world, there is no longer a
distinction between chemistry, mechanics, electromagnetism, biology,
music, engineering, etc.

Language is a two-way communication system that can convey both
concrete and abstract concepts (past, future, hypotheticals, invisible
or absent referents, impossibility, meta-discourse, etc.), using
productive combinations of identifiable atomic units that almost
exclusively have an arbitrary connection to their meanings.

You're Swiss... start with Saussure.

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

.

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