Re: Plausibility Check

In article <1155282851.252330.97630@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Franz Gnaedinger" <frgn@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Nathan Sanders wrote:

Related how? Does the inverse systematically yield the polar
opposite? What if the word has no opposite? If PAD means foot, what
the is the predicted meaning of DAP?

PAD means activity of feet, as in English to pad, pad along,
pad pad pad pad ..., DAP means activity of hands, to tap,
French tapper, in my medieval dialect we have Taape for
hand, toeple for to touch.

So are you asserting that the inverse always yields the opposite
meaning? If not, then you have no prediction.

If you have no predictions, then you have no science.

I made predictions. Already last year I discovered that

A discovery is not a prediction.

inverse forms have related meanings, and that some
permutations yield words around the same meme. This

What's the difference between "related meanings" and "around the same
meme"?

Laws _are_ predictions, in that they say if A then B.

Yes they are. But you don't have laws. Rather, you have unstable
tendencies.

In more ways than one.

In what way? Is the semantic relationship between XYZ and XZY
systematically the same for every choice of XYZ?

No, it is not.

Then your "laws" are not laws. They are not systematic, they make no
predictions, they are not science. They are random coincidences, with
your mind imposing a (partial) pattern on chaos.

"Can" is certainly not systematic. Either something happens, or it
does not. If it can, but need not, then you need to establish the
circumstances in which it does and in which it doesn't. Otherwise,
it's not predictive, it's not systematic, and it's not science.

A mute 'e' can be written or be omitted, you can't derive
it from a law, you must learn the cases.

Spelling is not science.

Which form is
correct: departement (as in French and German) or
department?

Yes.

phonems or phonemes?

In English, only "phonemes".

Languages are
teeming with exceptions. You should know that.

When you make actual predictions, you can determine what is and is not
an exception. From there, you can revise the theory to account for
the exceptions.

But you don't even bother with any of that pesky scientific method
stuff. Logic and rigor are hard! And they get in the way of your
fantasy.

So all descendant forms of your Magdalenian word PAD will always have
the vowel A in them? How then do you explain the /e/ in the Greek
root ped?

Pronounce the word silently,

That's not how language is normally transmitted.

without giving voice, over
and over again, as I told you several times, and you will
see what can happen to Magdalenian DAP: dap dap dap ...

I don't want to see what "can" happen. I want to know what your
"laws" are predicting precisely for when Magdalenian A comes out as
/e/ in Greek.

Nonsense (even beyond the idea that all humans speak English!). By
your logic, since human babies are human, they should be able to
sexually reproduce. This is something that they are capable of only
after they have undergone a particular period of development. Just
like with language.

And the human species has undergone a particular period
of time until English evolved.

A period of time that significantly predates the Magdalenians. They
weren't evolutionary infants.

The problem here is the same
as the one in early mathematics and geometry.

Stick to the topic. Your lack of knowledge of other fields doesn't
make up for your lack of knowledge of linguistics.

Everybody can feel at home in the
language of Shakespeare, but only since he lived and worked,
before him English was a simpler language.

No it wasn't. This statement just demonstrates further your utter
ignorance of English and of language in general.

You have not answered the question. If your Magdalenians were
pronouncing things "without voice", then how did they distinguish D
from T? PAD and PAT sound identical "without voice".

When you pronounce words silently you observe what happens
on the physiological level.

Again you refuse to answer the question. Continue to do so, and I can
only assume you are too stupid to know the answer.

The same applies
to PH and F - which none of you understands,

The sole sighted man in the land of the blind.

Reading is not speaking.

You can pronounce words without giving voice.

Whispering is not reading.

You have a serious problem with English vocabulary!

"Going along" is very different from "being identical".

I never said biology and linguistics are identical. I say
that language is a basic feature of life,

These two statements are in contradiction.

Etymology is not meaning.

Sez you.

I speak only the truth.

Irrelevant. Semantic shifts affect language in every type of culture.

I see that you follow Darwin's model of gradual evolution.

Semantic shifts have nothing to do with biological evolution, so you
cannot conclude any such thing.

Homo sapiens sapiens
of the Middle Stone Age in South Africa, Blombos cave,
75,000 BP, had a fully developed language according to
Christopher Henshilwood (look up his excellent website).
Any idea how that language worked? Would you assume
that it was close to German, with very longs words such as
Vierwaldstaetterseedampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitaens-
muetzengoldsternglanz?

I wouldn't assume their words were short or long. Unlike you, I don't
make unwarranted assumptions about ancient word lengths. Human
languages can have short words (Chinese), and they can have long words
(Finnish).

If you fall in love with someone you are using
language on the level of bacteria, of exchanging chemical
substances.

Chemistry is not linguistics.

Then you should know that the way parents speak to each other is
completely different from baby talk.

No, baby talk is still present in adult talk, as early Rome
is still present in modern Rome.

"Present in" is not the opposite of "completely different". Again,
you need to learn the subset relation.

Your definition is flawed (see below).

Point out what is wrong with my definition of language.

That's what the "(see below)" was for.

You are just describing some aspects of modern language,

No, I'm describing human language in all forms that are known to us,
rather than postulating the existence of some fantasy language that
unnecessarily bears little resemblance to anything like human language.

Who? Either he did a terrible job, or you were a poor student.

Pater Rupert Ruhstaller, he gave me private lessons
in his monastery cell, he showed and explained me his
revolutionary grammar that relies on what he calls
functors and arguments, and which can be visualized
by means of budding circles - completely different from
all we learned in school.

Sounds like some primitive, needlessly graphical, version of
dependency grammar. So? It's been done, and better.

As I realized only much later,
his private lessons gave me the courage to look at
things from different angles. I thought there is only
one way to look at grammar, the boring way that makes
a billion of young people suffer, but no, there are very
different ways. And also different ways of looking at
language itself.

Different perspectives are important, but if they are done without any
connection to standard perspectives, especially when done without
regard for the scientific method, you completely lose the benefit of
the insights of countless years of rigorous intellectual inquiry, and
introduce a higher chance of re-creating errors that other people made
and corrected long ago.

No, they are not. There are more phonemes in Latin than represented
by the alphabet, and there are some phonemes with multiple spellings.
It is not a one-to-one mapping, which is why linguists generally avoid
using spelling to talk about phonemes.

The Roman letters were _their_ phonemes.

No, they weren't. Your understanding of the word "phoneme", like your
understanding of much of English, linguistics, and science, is
completely lacking, and you should stop using it until you know what
it means.

No, we don't. PH is a digraph, and F is a single letter. P and F may
be vaguely similar in shape, but the closed loop of the P and the
addition of H make PH and F very easy to distinguish.

I explained to several members of sci.lang that the difference
between PH and F lies in the amount of pressure the lower
lip applies to the upper teeth.

I don't use my teeth to write PH or F. Perhaps that's your problem!
Teeth are for chewing food, not for writing letters.

very = too

My definition of language were too broad if it included,
say, rocks. The laws of gravity affect both human
beings and rocks, but my definition of language does
make a difference between living beings and, say, rocks.

I suppose it's a good first step that you've managed to define
language so as to exclude rocks...

Biochemical reactions can be language
if they serve the purpose of language.

No, they can't. Whatever concept you're thinking of is not language,
and it's not even clear that the concept you have in mind is coherent
or useful.

What work have they done on *language* specifically?

Stephen Jay Gould corrects Darwin's model of evolution
(The Structure of Evolutionary Theory),

Evolution is not language.

Richard Dawkins
has a fresh approach to language in his Selfish Gene
(second edition),

You don't even know any of the stale approaches! How would you know
that Dawkins has a fresh approach, as opposed to a rehash of what is
already known?

Gary Marcus tells you that language
isn't just processed by the Broca and Wernicke center.

From Gary Marcus's own webpage:

"Why is that humans can acquire language when no other species can?"
<http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gary/>:

From recent articles by Gary Marcus:

"No animal communication system comes close to human language in its
power, and by most accounts language has been on the planet for less
than half a million years..."
<http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gary/marcusArticles/marcus%202006%20nyt.pdf>

"Human language seems to be unique in the natural world. Non-human
communication is predominantly restricted to simple messages such as
alarm calls and identification signals, with little in the way of
complex structure. By contrast, the average human has access to a
vocabulary of tens of thousands of words and can, guided by an
intricate set of structural rules, assemble them into a potentially
infinite number of meaningful sentences, referring not only to the
here and now, but also to the past, the future and the abstract."
<http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gary/marcusArticles/Fisher%20Marcus%202006.pd
f>

This is someone who has a proper definition of language. If you like
his work so much, I don't understand why your definition is so flawed.
You would do well to actually read what he writes, rather than ignore
him.

Biological evolution is not the correct model for language change,
despite some surface similarities. Here are just a few ways in which
they are different:

As language, in my opinion, is a basic feature of life,

Opinion is not science or fact.

the similarities don't just occur on the surface. There
are deep similarities, I feel and believe.

Feeling and belief are not science or fact.

* target: language change can affect a single individual over the
course of their life, while evolution only affects descendants

How do language changes occur? they are the consequence
of some impact from the outer world.

Not generally. Language change is largely a purely internal process,
triggered by properties of the language itself and of language in
general.

* time scale: 1000 years of language change results in something
completely new, while 1000 years of evolution isn't even noticeable

Within a couple of decades our climate changed considerably,

Climate change is not biological evolution.

in the hot summer of 2003 our glaciers, of which we are so
proud, lost one eight of their volume - in one single summer.
If the heating up goes on that way, we shall loose our glaciers
completely within hundred years. And together with the warming
up of the climate the vegetation in the Swiss Alps is changing,
and dramatically so, typical mountain trees (Fichten, a lovely
sort of firs) disappear, while trees that grow in the south are
climbing the mountain slopes.

Death is not biological evolution.

* impetus: both can be stimulated by random physical factors, but
language can also be affected by social and mental factors

The changes are relatively small, gradual evolution or
micro-evolution allows adaptations, a famous example
being the white moths of Manchester (?) that turned
into gray moths with the begin of industrialization and
with pollution.

Complete non sequitur. White moths have nothing to do with the
distinction between physical and social/mental factors.

Get an idea of basic linguistics and you will acquire an actual
understanding of language.

It's a popular misunderstanding that learning all about
the categories and classifications of linguistics will
let you understand language.

Linguistics is not the study of categories and classifications.

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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