Re: elementary Sanskrit blunder by Harvard professor

analyst41@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Sep 17, 10:43 am, analys...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Sep 17, 9:48 am, Harlan Messinger
As someone--Ross?--pointed out to you, at the most trivial level, yeah,
there is a reason for everything, but that reason may be as simple as,
"Because this is the way patterns of usage went." What makes you think
it's any more significant than that? Your argument relies on an
underlying premise that every time people open their mouths and use on
particular word instead of a synonym, they go through a whole, conscious
selection process. Your use of the word "chosen" encapsulates this
fallacy. It's ridiculous. Do you think there's some nontrivial reason
why different Americans in different parts of the country say "grinder",
"hoagie", "hero", "sub", etc.? Why some say "bag" and others say "sack"?
yes - there would turn out to be a reason for each of these if someone
were to look for it.

a clarification. I don't mean that the form of every word must have a
reason. If a speech community has a more or less stable language and
if at a certain point in time, (due to contact or innovations by a
subset of the community ) more than one form becomes possible for some
words, the form(s) that ends/end up winning would be governed more or
less deterministically by reasons that come from the stable parts of
the language.

That's an interesting conjecture but I can't imagine why you think it would be true--what *influences* from the so-called "stable parts" of the language (here you go again, inventing concepts out of the blue) would have any effect. Once again, you attempt to argue to your conclusions by adding more premises that are themselves both unfounded and unobvious.

And as it happens, the examples I already gave you contradict your proposition. If the outcome among "grinder", "hoagie", "hero", "sub", etc. were to be "governed more or less deterministically ..." then there wouldn't be different outcomes in different parts of a country where the idiolects and dialects the speakers are all speaking (including the "stable parts") remain, overwhelmingly, the same language. Likewise for "bag" and "sack"; "pop", "soda", and "coke"; "drinking fountain" and "bubbler"; etc.

Never mind deterministic: are you familiar with the term "stochastic"?
.

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