Re: open letter to the Google company, on the value of the scientific groups

On Sep 26, 3:47 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Just because you misunderstood this five years ago doesn't make it any
more a position that was held then and abandoned now.

Probably, anyone whom you interpreted that way was under the
misapprehension that you had some familiarity with historical
lingustics so that the basics didn't need to be spelled out for you.

I remember a long and petertediousdaniels discussion
with you about sound laws. You told me time and again
that they hold without exception. And Prof. Dr. Nathan
Sanders has again spoken of rigorosity here in this thread.
You can apply the sound laws in a rigorous way, of course,
but the outcome is the same as when you apply the laws
of Ptolemaic astronomy in a rigorous way: yielding fairly
good approximations, but nothing exact. Reminds me
of a question I posed to my teacher in primary school.
We had learned about atoms and that they can be split,
so I asked what happens if I cut an apple in two halves
and inadvertently make it so that the blade halfs
an atom? My teacher told me that I must not fear
such an effect, because the sharp egde of even the
sharpest blade is way broader than an atom; compared
to an atom the blade is very blunt. In a similar way
the sound laws are blunt, you can't really work in
a rigorous way with them, they are rules, no laws.
And sound rules, or however one wants to call them,
don't lead far enough back in time - for achieving
this we need other rules or rightful laws, for example
my four laws of Magdalenian: they carry me back
18,000 years, three times the age of PIE.

.

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