Re: Why does some culture's language become replaced but others don't?

On Jul 10, 6:39 am, Adam Funk <a24...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2008-07-09, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

Seriously, don't you think what you read influences your speech?  At
the very least, you must have a larger vocabulary as a result.

????? What does vocabulary size have to do with linguistic
phenomena?????

Are you trolling?

From a generative perspective (if nothing else) increasing the set of
terminals increases the range of different utterances that you can
produce.  So the language is "bigger".

What does that mean??

Since when is "number of utterances," as opposed to the structure of
utterances, or rather models of the structure of utterances, of
interest to generativists?

Why do you hold this ideological view (which goes against common sense
as well as my experience and that of others I know) that reading
doesn't "broaden your horizons" encyclopedically and linguistically?

Encyclopeically, certainly. Linguistically, you're being ridiculous.

Apart from the generative argument, broadening the information that
you can think about and discuss must broaden your range of utterances.

?? Literacy alters syntactic structuring??

Or is reading a complete waste of time?

So you subscribe to the absurd pre-scientific view that preliterate
societies are intellectually inferior?
.

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