Basque and Etruscan
Larry Trask
detailing his important contributions to linguistics and other
disciplines, though his qualifications appear to consist of little
more than a few years of working in the personnel office for IBM and
Kodak, plus a diving certificate. Still, he has published several
books in which he finds Basque under the bed. Apparently Iberian is
Basque, Minoan is Basque, Etruscan is Basque, and so on.
Beyond a doubt, his most critically acclaimed book is the one
demonstrating that Etruscan is Basque. Here's a sample of his work, a
sample singled out by the author himself as demonstrating the success
of his method particularly well.
Alonso tells us that the Etruscan word <dula> 'death' is "practically
identical" to the Basque word <dulla> 'scythe'. Since everybody knows
that the scythe is a representation of death, we have a powerful piece
of evidence that Etruscan is the same language as Basque. This pair
of words is especially significant since "the Basques are obsessed
with death".
Impressed? Well, where shall I start?
No such Etruscan word as <dula> exists in any sense at all, and Alonso
has fabricated it. No such Etruscan word could possibly exist.
Etruscan had no consonant /d/, and the Etruscan alphabet had no letter
for spelling this sound. So, the Etruscans had no such word; they
couldn't have pronounced it if they'd encountered it, and they
couldn't have written it down.
Moreover, no such Basque word as <dulla> exists either, and this too
is an invention of Alonso's. But there does exist a real Basque word
for 'scythe' which has the form <dallu> south of the Pyrenees and
<dalla> north of the mountains. However, no native and ancient Basque
word ever begins with /d/ -- a fact known to everybody who knows
anything about Basque -- and this word is transparently borrowed from
Romance descendants of late Latin <daculum> 'scythe'. The southern
form is taken, with perfect regularity, from early Romance *<dallo>
(<ll> = palatal lateral), while the northern form is borrowed from the
regular Gascon development <dalha> (<lh> = palatal lateral).
Alonso wants us to believe that scythe = death is a universal human
metaphor. But, of course, the personification of death as a Grim
Reaper wielding a scythe is an expressly Christian image, and one not
recorded before well into the Middle Ages. The Etruscans, of course,
were not Christians, and neither were the Basques before the tenth
century at the earliest.
Furthermore, the practical and down-to-earth Basques are obsessed with
death the way the Brazilians are obsessed with ice hockey. Alonso has
invented this drivel, too.
Why am I bothering to recount these imbecilities? Because they are
taken seriously. All of Alonso's books are published by a prestigious
Spanish university press. One of them is co-authored by a prominent
Spanish geneticist who believes that his genetic maps support Alonso's
conclusions.
Alonso's Etruscan book received glowing reviews in some supposedly
serious newspapers, including Le Monde and the Times of London -- and
the Times went so far as to contribute an editorial commenting on the
importance of Alonso's work.
Now, no respectable periodical would allow a book on, say, history or
literature to be reviewed by somebody who is utterly ignorant of the
subject. But linguistics is different: *any* oaf is allowed to review
a book on linguistics, and to pronounce it a scholarly triumph even
when it consists entirely of brain-dead garbage.
We are discriminated against.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Peter T. Daniels
The Etruscan alphabet includes the letter <D> -- it's in all the
abecedaria, and after all it did get passed from the Greeks to the
Romans via them -- but it never occurs in an Etruscan-language
inscription.
> Now, no respectable periodical would allow a book on, say, history or
> literature to be reviewed by somebody who is utterly ignorant of the
> subject. But linguistics is different: *any* oaf is allowed to review
> a book on linguistics, and to pronounce it a scholarly triumph even
> when it consists entirely of brain-dead garbage.
>
> We are discriminated against.
Thanks for reminding me to send an e-mail to Leonard Lopate, who
yesterday devoted 40 minutes of WNYC's airtime (you could hear it at
wnyc.org if you were a grammatological masochist) to David Sacks and his
*Language Visible*.
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net
Des Small
[...]
> Why am I bothering to recount these imbecilities? Because they are
> taken seriously. All of Alonso's books are published by a prestigious
> Spanish university press. One of them is co-authored by a prominent
> Spanish geneticist who believes that his genetic maps support Alonso's
> conclusions.
>
> Alonso's Etruscan book received glowing reviews in some supposedly
> serious newspapers, including Le Monde and the Times of London -- and
> the Times went so far as to contribute an editorial commenting on the
> importance of Alonso's work.
Who supposes the Murdoch Times is a serious newspaper? (If you're
reading, such persons, stop it!)
> Now, no respectable periodical would allow a book on, say, history or
> literature to be reviewed by somebody who is utterly ignorant of the
> subject. But linguistics is different: *any* oaf is allowed to review
> a book on linguistics, and to pronounce it a scholarly triumph even
> when it consists entirely of brain-dead garbage.
Good heavens! Linguo-genetics isn't linguistics, it's an important
new interdiscipline with an entirely new set of rules!
> We are discriminated against.
Given that the natural mode of communication of linguists appears to
be polemical denunciation, how's anyone supposed to know that Ruhlen
or this twit _really is_ a charlatan?
Are Hawking's popular books mostly reviewed by physicists? Oliver
Sacks's by neurologists? I've definitely seen blurb quotes by Martin
Amis on books by Richard Dawkins, and I'm fairly sure Amis has no
science background. Of course those are science subjects and in the
sciences peer review usually weeds out worst of the crazies and your
example genres were humanities, but for some reason lots of people
think linguistics is a kind of science (even this group is called
sci.lang!) and apparently assume it's capable of keeping its own house
in order.
Des
has no idea why.
--
des....@bristol.ac.uk
Lester Zick
sci.lang wrote:
[. . .]
An interesting discussion. I'm curious to see how it develops so if
you don't mind I'll cross it to sci.cognitive for reference.
Regards - Lester
Lester Zick
<h.mes...@comcast.net> in sci.cognitive wrote:
>
>"Lester Zick" <lester...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
>news:3f7afa67...@netnews.att.net...
>? Is sci.cognitive your own personal messaging tracking area? I suspect the
>other users of sci.cognitive would prefer it if you would follow discussions
>in the newsgroups where they live and belong.
Then perhaps you should consider replying only to posts addressed
exclusively to that newsgroup and not to this one. Then perhaps I
should remind myself - much to my chagrin - that sci.lang has a self
appointed censor.
Those interested in cognitive issues often have a parallel interest in
the history and use of language. And I am not aware that intellectual
issues have any special arenas where they belong to the exclusion of
others. Sounds rather like separate but equal to me. But who am I to
complain of intellectual segregation?
The fact is that you are probably correct except that very few have
much to say on this newsgroup. So the issue doesn't really arise.
Sci.lang happens to move fairly rapidly and it would be nice to see
some of the more interesting traffic on occasion.
Regards - Lester
Lester Zick
Here you have charges of outright misrepresentation in the academic
analysis of the history of languages. And I should think you would
welcome the widest possible airing of those charges and their merits.
Of course I may be mistaken.
Regards - Lester
Harlan Messinger
> On Wed, 1 Oct 2003 13:38:14 -0400, "Harlan Messinger"
> <h.mes...@comcast.net> in sci.cognitive wrote:
>
> >
> >"Lester Zick" <lester...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
> >news:3f7afa67...@netnews.att.net...
> >> On 1 Oct 2003 06:27:12 -0700, lar...@sussex.ac.uk (Larry Trask) in
> >> sci.lang wrote:
> >>
> >> [. . .]
> >>
> >> An interesting discussion. I'm curious to see how it develops so if
> >> you don't mind I'll cross it to sci.cognitive for reference.
> >
> >? Is sci.cognitive your own personal messaging tracking area? I suspect
the
> >other users of sci.cognitive would prefer it if you would follow
discussions
> >in the newsgroups where they live and belong.
>
> Then perhaps you should consider replying only to posts addressed
> exclusively to that newsgroup and not to this one. Then perhaps I
> should remind myself - much to my chagrin - that sci.lang has a self
> appointed censor.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the eternal response of the person who thinks that the
only rude behavior is pointing out other people's rude behavior. Everything
else goes, according to such people.
>
> Those interested in cognitive issues often have a parallel interest in
> the history and use of language.
Those interested in cars often have an interest in sports. Why not just
cross-post every message between them and completely lose the value of the
distinction?
> And I am not aware that intellectual
> issues have any special arenas where they belong to the exclusion of
> others.
Unless you feel that every newsgroup might just as well be called
alt.intellectual and have the same content, you might recognize that their
names are as specific as they are for a valid reason.
Alan Hogue
>The Spanish "scholar" Jorge Alonso maintains a vast home page
>detailing his important contributions to linguistics and other
>disciplines, though his qualifications appear to consist of little
>more than a few years of working in the personnel office for IBM and
>Kodak, plus a diving certificate. Still, he has published several
>books in which he finds Basque under the bed. Apparently Iberian is
>Basque, Minoan is Basque, Etruscan is Basque, and so on.
>
>Beyond a doubt, his most critically acclaimed book is the one
>demonstrating that Etruscan is Basque. Here's a sample of his work, a
>sample singled out by the author himself as demonstrating the success
>of his method particularly well.
>
>Alonso tells us that the Etruscan word <dula> 'death' is "practically
>identical" to the Basque word <dulla> 'scythe'. Since everybody knows
>that the scythe is a representation of death, we have a powerful piece
>of evidence that Etruscan is the same language as Basque. This pair
>of words is especially significant since "the Basques are obsessed
>with death".
>
>
>
This reminds me of the kind of false etymology which medieval scholars
were so fond of.
Ross Clark
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:3F7AD8...@worldnet.att.net...
>
> Thanks for reminding me to send an e-mail to Leonard Lopate, who
> yesterday devoted 40 minutes of WNYC's airtime (you could hear it at
> wnyc.org if you were a grammatological masochist) to David Sacks and his
> *Language Visible*.
> --
> Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net
Please tell us more about what's wrong with this book. In my quick net
search, the only indication I could find that it wasn't a fascinating and
admirable work was Sacks' reply to a Toronto Globe & Mail reviewer who
seemed to have made a few howlers of her own.
Ross Clark
Lester Zick
<h.mes...@comcast.net> in sci.cognitive wrote:
>
>"Lester Zick" <lester...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
>news:3f7b3202...@netnews.att.net...
>> On Wed, 1 Oct 2003 13:38:14 -0400, "Harlan Messinger"
>> <h.mes...@comcast.net> in sci.cognitive wrote:
>>
>> >
>> >"Lester Zick" <lester...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
>> >news:3f7afa67...@netnews.att.net...
>> >> On 1 Oct 2003 06:27:12 -0700, lar...@sussex.ac.uk (Larry Trask) in
>> >> sci.lang wrote:
>> >>
>> >> [. . .]
>> >>
>> >> An interesting discussion. I'm curious to see how it develops so if
>> >> you don't mind I'll cross it to sci.cognitive for reference.
>> >
>> >? Is sci.cognitive your own personal messaging tracking area? I suspect
>the
>> >other users of sci.cognitive would prefer it if you would follow
>discussions
>> >in the newsgroups where they live and belong.
>>
>> Then perhaps you should consider replying only to posts addressed
>> exclusively to that newsgroup and not to this one. Then perhaps I
>> should remind myself - much to my chagrin - that sci.lang has a self
>> appointed censor.
>
>Yeah, yeah, yeah, the eternal response of the person who thinks that the
>only rude behavior is pointing out other people's rude behavior. Everything
>else goes, according to such people.
My own post was polite and presumed nothing except appreciation of an
interesting topic. On the other hand you begin by presuming everything
and having nothing to say except that my expressions of interest don't
belong where I put them. The only rude behavior? Perhaps not.
>
>>
>> Those interested in cognitive issues often have a parallel interest in
>> the history and use of language.
>
>Those interested in cars often have an interest in sports. Why not just
>cross-post every message between them and completely lose the value of the
>distinction?
I'm not the author of the thread. Why aren't you addressing him with
your concerns for the purity of sci.lang?
>
>> And I am not aware that intellectual
>> issues have any special arenas where they belong to the exclusion of
>> others.
>
>Unless you feel that every newsgroup might just as well be called
>alt.intellectual and have the same content, you might recognize that their
>names are as specific as they are for a valid reason.
And of course language has no overlap with cognition. And science in
general has no interest in misrepresentations of issues in science or
the integrity of the press in reporting on science. I'm still not sure
what your interest is in all this.
>
Regards - Lester
Peter T. Daniels
Oh, wow, my very own shill! Here's what I wrote, with his response (his
top-posting corrected):
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Peter T. Daniels [mailto:gram...@worldnet.att.net]
> > Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2003 10:00 AM
> > To: ny&co
> > Subject: Language Visible
> >
> > Hi Leonard,
> >
> > When you were considering whether to book David Sacks, to whom you
> > devoted some 40 minutes yesterday, did you overlook the admission on pp.
> > ix-xii that he was completely unqualified to write the book?
> >
> > I was amazed at how unprepared your questions sounded (since you're
> > _never_ unprepared for an interview), until I eventually realized that
> > you must have prepared your materials on the basis of the book. (Which
> > further means that somehow you managed to read the whole thing -- I've
> > had it for about a month and still haven't managed to get past p. 75. At
> > least other authors of recent alphabet nonsense, such as John Man and,
> > heaven help us, Leonard Shlain, produce _readable_ claptrap.)
> >
> > Questions like the background of the Korean alphabet are not in the
> > least mysterious, and any scholar of writing systems could have given
> > you the answer.
> >
> > Why he claims that the English and Hebrew alphabetic orders are "35% the
> > same" is an utter mystery -- they're virtually identical, and for every
> > "discrepancy," there's a simple explanation.
> >
> > On p. 50 he says that the ancient sound of Aleph was glottal stop -- but
> > when he tried to demonstrate it for you, it turned out he doesn't know
> > what a glottal stop is! He was using a "ch" (German) sound -- Kaph
> > without dagesh, or ancient Het, perhaps -- which was totally wrong.
> >
> > And so on. I was cringing behind the wheel of my car.
> >
> > Do you have any idea why books like Sacks's -- and Man's, and Shlain's,
> > and a number of others -- are appearing with increasing frequency, but
> > scholars (such as me) who want to write _accurate_ books about writing
> > for the general public are told by Marketing Departments that "there's
> > no market for them"?
> >
> > (You might enjoy looking through *The World's Writing Systems*, coedited
> > by me and William Bright [Oxford UP, 1996], which you can find on the
> > open reference shelf in the [former] Oriental Division of NYPL -- in
> > fact it's currently in the Fall Sale list at the OUP website.)
> >
> > PS -- One note for yourself: Whenever you mention Chinese writing (and
> > you do so surprisingly often), you call it writing "in calligraphy."
> > Please look up the word "calligraphy"; you mean writing "with
> > characters," which are, according to their function, "logograms" = 'word
> > signs' (and not "ideograms," which would be 'signs for ideas'). (There
> > are great calligraphic traditions in Islam and in the Western,
> > roman-alphabet-using, world as well as in East Asia.)
> >
> > (Oh, wow, your e-address is still "New York and Company"! --I clicked
> > "lopat...@wnyc.org" on the "Contact Us" webpage.)
> >
> > Your faithful listener,
> Thanks. I was disappointed in that segment as well.
Peter T. Daniels
That's almost exactly what science writer Steve Olsen says in the
relevant chapter of *Mapping Human History* -- at least he doesn't
reproduce the fraudulent butterfly, but he does say he chooses to
believe Ruhlen because he likes the neatness of the "lumper" approach.
> Are Hawking's popular books mostly reviewed by physicists? Oliver
> Sacks's by neurologists? I've definitely seen blurb quotes by Martin
> Amis on books by Richard Dawkins, and I'm fairly sure Amis has no
> science background. Of course those are science subjects and in the
> sciences peer review usually weeds out worst of the crazies and your
> example genres were humanities, but for some reason lots of people
> think linguistics is a kind of science (even this group is called
> sci.lang!) and apparently assume it's capable of keeping its own house
> in order.
>
> Des
> has no idea why.
Sacks's blurbs are by Mark Dunn, "author of *Ella Minnow Pea*" (which is
a _very_ delightful novel) and Alberto Manguel, "author of *A History of
Reading*."
Come to think of it, last year some time a writer in Canada emailed
asking if he could send an advance copy (or something) of his book, and
I said go ahead, I hope I won't have to say negative things about it,
but it never happened; but I just checked my e-mail archives and there's
nothing from "David Sacks" or "Sacks, David." Does that mean yet another
one is about to come out of Canada?
Larry Trask
[LT]
> > No such Etruscan word as <dula> exists in any sense at all, and Alonso
> > has fabricated it. No such Etruscan word could possibly exist.
> > Etruscan had no consonant /d/, and the Etruscan alphabet had no letter
> > for spelling this sound. So, the Etruscans had no such word; they
> > couldn't have pronounced it if they'd encountered it, and they
> > couldn't have written it down.
>
> The Etruscan alphabet includes the letter <D> -- it's in all the
> abecedaria, and after all it did get passed from the Greeks to the
> Romans via them -- but it never occurs in an Etruscan-language
> inscription.
Well, the Etruscan alphabet *originally* contained a letter for /d/,
of course, since the Etruscans received this from the Greeks and
passed it on to the Romans. But what happened later?
Here is Larissa Bonfante:
"Etruscan did not have the voiced sounds b, g, d, and soon expelled
their letters from its alphabet."
This passage is taken from the article on Etruscan writing in the big
reference book edited by Daniels and Bright. Peter, are you telling
me that this book is unreliable? ;-)
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Larry Trask
[LT]
> > We are discriminated against.
> Given that the natural mode of communication of linguists appears to
> be polemical denunciation,
Hardly. How much communication between linguists have you seen?
> how's anyone supposed to know that Ruhlen
> or this twit _really is_ a charlatan?
This would be a trivial exercise if journalists merely took the
trouble to check with one or two professionals before slobbering all
over these guys, and if periodicals exercised the minimal caution of
having their books reviewed, if at all, by people who know something
about the subject matter.
The public prominence of these nutters is not the fault of linguists,
who have done nothing to encourage it: it is the fault of
irresponsible journalists who will publicize anything linguistic if it
looks spectacular.
> Are Hawking's popular books mostly reviewed by physicists? Oliver
> Sacks's by neurologists? I've definitely seen blurb quotes by Martin
> Amis on books by Richard Dawkins, and I'm fairly sure Amis has no
> science background.
But these are popular books, and popular books, by definition, are
aimed at non-specialist readers. This fact raises some interesting
issues of reviewing, which we can discuss on another occasion.
Alonso's books, and Ruhlen's book on Proto-World and related topics,
make no pretense of being popular books. They purport to be serious
scholarly studies. There is therefore no case for allowing them to be
reviewed by anyone other than knowledgeable professionals.
An example. A new biography of Yeats has just appeared, and it is
being reviewed in the broadsheets. All the reviewers plainly know
their stuff. All of them know a great deal about Yeats's life and
work, about poetry in general, and about Yeats's Ireland. This is no
more than we would expect.
What would you think of a supposedly serious periodical that allowed
this book to be reviewed by somebody who had never heard of Yeats, had
never read any of his poems, knew nothing about poetry, and couldn't
find Ireland on a map?
That's exactly what all periodicals do with books on linguistics. As
I remarked earlier, we are discriminated against.
> Of course those are science subjects and in the
> sciences peer review usually weeds out worst of the crazies and your
> example genres were humanities,
But *plenty* of crackpottery makes it into print, in book form, on
scientific topics. The archaeology section in Border's contains books
on Atlantis and other lost worlds. Several years ago, I found a book
in the physics section by some sad case who claimed he had
carbon-dated the atmosphere and found it to be only 15,000 years old.
There's no shortage of cretinous drivel in the science subjects, but
these lunacies are very seldom reviewed at all by serious periodicals,
and they almost never get rave reviews written by scientific
ignoramuses. But linguistics gets treated differently.
> but for some reason lots of people
> think linguistics is a kind of science (even this group is called
> sci.lang!) and apparently assume it's capable of keeping its own house
> in order.
We do keep our house in order. Nobody in linguistics pays any
attention to these crackpots, just as nobody in physics pays any
attention to people who try to carbon-date the atmosphere.
But the journalists treat us differently from the other disciplines.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Merlijn De Smit
> The Spanish "scholar" Jorge Alonso maintains a vast home page
> detailing his important contributions to linguistics and other
> disciplines, though his qualifications appear to consist of little
> more than a few years of working in the personnel office for IBM and
> Kodak, plus a diving certificate. Still, he has published several
> books in which he finds Basque under the bed. Apparently Iberian is
> Basque, Minoan is Basque, Etruscan is Basque, and so on.
>
> Beyond a doubt, his most critically acclaimed book is the one
> demonstrating that Etruscan is Basque. Here's a sample of his work, a
> sample singled out by the author himself as demonstrating the success
> of his method particularly well.
>
> Alonso tells us that the Etruscan word <dula> 'death' is "practically
> identical" to the Basque word <dulla> 'scythe'. Since everybody knows
> that the scythe is a representation of death, we have a powerful piece
> of evidence that Etruscan is the same language as Basque. This pair
> of words is especially significant since "the Basques are obsessed
> with death".
That is almost as good but not quite as good as the Fenno-Celtic
etymologists here some years ago who connected Irish <colm> 'pigeon'
to Finnish <kolme> 'three' with a little footnote: "The toe!"...
Like, as if all the other birds have four or two toes.
(...)
> Why am I bothering to recount these imbecilities? Because they are
> taken seriously. All of Alonso's books are published by a prestigious
> Spanish university press. One of them is co-authored by a prominent
> Spanish geneticist who believes that his genetic maps support Alonso's
> conclusions.
>
> Alonso's Etruscan book received glowing reviews in some supposedly
> serious newspapers, including Le Monde and the Times of London -- and
> the Times went so far as to contribute an editorial commenting on the
> importance of Alonso's work.
>
> Now, no respectable periodical would allow a book on, say, history or
> literature to be reviewed by somebody who is utterly ignorant of the
> subject. But linguistics is different: *any* oaf is allowed to review
> a book on linguistics, and to pronounce it a scholarly triumph even
> when it consists entirely of brain-dead garbage.
>
> We are discriminated against.
>
> Larry Trask
> lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Are you sure this is a problem particular to historical linguistics? I
am not qualified to distinguish real research and hype in, say, the
'hard' sciences, but some of the stuff that gets reviewed and treated
quite seriously in popular science magazines like New Scientist seems
to range to me from slightly odd to quite bizzarre, meaning, Rupert
Sheldrake-like bizzarre.
Of course there is an analogy: historical linguists have to defend
superficially quite un-seksy work in a field full of uncertain factors
whereas people would rather like to hear their distant forefathers
were the earliest original inhabitants of Europe or the builders of
Stonehenge or whatever. Similarly physicists may not have much of
interest to offer to people who want to know where they go after they
die.
Merlijn de Smit
Peter T. Daniels
Little did I know that Larissa is an archeologist rather than an
Etruscanist ... I also had never heard of the inventor of <G>, whose
name is Ruga, not Rufa. Bill says he should've caught that, implying
that he _had_ heard of the guy previously.
But there is no Etruscan abecedary that doesn't include <B D G>, and
there is no Etruscan inscription that uses any of them.
Peter T. Daniels
Not quite. The Wiley one (*The Origin of Language*) is for the gen.pub.;
the Stanford one (*On the Origin of Languages*) is the one with the
external appearance of being a scholarly work.
> scholarly studies. There is therefore no case for allowing them to be
> reviewed by anyone other than knowledgeable professionals.
<snip Yeats>
> But *plenty* of crackpottery makes it into print, in book form, on
> scientific topics. The archaeology section in Border's contains books
> on Atlantis and other lost worlds. Several years ago, I found a book
> in the physics section by some sad case who claimed he had
> carbon-dated the atmosphere and found it to be only 15,000 years old.
The new Wall Street Borders (which replaces the WTC one) keeps its two
shelves of linguistics smack dab in the middle of the New Age &
Mysticism sections. While taking advantage of the opening-day discounts
I brought this to the attention of two managerial-looking persons
(including the one stationed by the cash register lines who was
soliciting comments), and they both said it was a matter of space
allocation -- they'd try to fit it into the Social Sciences at some
point.
That was in June IIRC. Last week I went there again and they hadn't
moved a thing.
> There's no shortage of cretinous drivel in the science subjects, but
> these lunacies are very seldom reviewed at all by serious periodicals,
> and they almost never get rave reviews written by scientific
> ignoramuses. But linguistics gets treated differently.
>
> > but for some reason lots of people
> > think linguistics is a kind of science (even this group is called
> > sci.lang!) and apparently assume it's capable of keeping its own house
> > in order.
>
> We do keep our house in order. Nobody in linguistics pays any
> attention to these crackpots, just as nobody in physics pays any
> attention to people who try to carbon-date the atmosphere.
>
> But the journalists treat us differently from the other disciplines.
Leonard Lopate even has a monthly visit from Patricia T. (*Woe Is I*,
etc.) O'Conner, an alleged language expert, and she never answers the
simplest called-in questions that might have anything to do with
linguistics. (He used to use Richard Lederer, who at least keeps
somewhat up with the field.) In her favor, she often does come back the
next month with the right answers to some of the queries.
Des Small
> Des Small <des....@bristol.ac.uk> wrote in message news:<yyrjbrt1...@pc156.maths.bris.ac.uk>...
>
> [LT]
>
> > > We are discriminated against.
>
> > Given that the natural mode of communication of linguists appears to
> > be polemical denunciation,
>
> Hardly. How much communication between linguists have you seen?
Well, some. Annoyingly, my university's library doesn't have _The
linguistics wars_, so I've probably missed out on the best stuff, but
I'm sure you saw John Lawler's linguist list review:
<http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-644.html>
Or there's Gary Gazdar in interview:
<http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/lab/nlp/gazdar/briscoe/conclusion.html>
"""
If you think about funding linguistics departments in universities so
that they do the work necessary to describe natural languages and to
theorize about the nature of natural languages in a way that
constitutes a contribution to scientific knowledge, then linguistics
departments patently don't do that. That's not where the brownie
points are. A lot of it is hermetic, it's not actually of any use to
anyone else. It's a closed internal system.
If I was charged with university funding, I would pull the plug.
"""
and
<http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/lab/nlp/gazdar/briscoe/linguistics.html>
"""
EJB So, to somebody coming into the field, offered a job in a
linguistics department, what would you say?
GG Learn how to use a computer and change department.
"""
(Note in particular that the question said nothing about Chomsky,
generativeness or syntax; just "linguistics department".)
Or there's Ivan Sag, in interview
<http://www.let.uu.nl/~Anne-Marie.Mineur/personal/Ta/Sag.html>
"""
Q : Would you call GB [government and binding] a bureaucracy?
A : ``I would call GB a church. It has a deity at the top: Noam
Chomsky. It has high priests, some high priestesses; it has a sacred
literature, including various unpublished and hard to procure
documents. It also has heresy - essentially what everyone else in
linguistics does, not to mention the work on language done in other
fields, e.g. psychology or computer science. GB even has a miracle to
explain: the miracle of language acquisition. So, if you think about
it, there is really a near isomorphism from GB to Catholicism.
Of course you in Europe have a somewhat more ecumenical approach to
research in general. You seem to interact with each other more
respectfully. The familiar mode of presentation in the US is to
demonstrate that one's own theory is adequate in every respect, and
that one's adversary's view is, in every respect, not simply wrong,
but hopelessly stupid. This arrogant and intolerant style is, I'm
afraid, a (possibly unintentional) contribution of Chomsky's.
Chomsky actually does it with a certain grace, as someone with his
intellectual stature can do, but not all of his lesserlings are so
graceful about it. But even so - basically, no one wants to lock horns
with Chomsky. Those who disagree with him in general avoid
confrontation with him. And this, I think, is at least part of the
explanation for why Chomsky's ideas have achieved the effect that they
have. Few dare to go up against the force of one dominating person's
tenacious personality.'' """
And of course the sections of Pullum's _Eskimo vocabulary hoax_
dedicated to Chomsky, which are sort of jocular, but clearly no less
meant to hurt for that.
And then there was the review in *Language* of introductory generative
syntax books in Linguist a while back that went out of its way to
insist McCawley's book was essentially worthless since it the theory
didn't have a framework, as well as the introduction to said book
itself saying that other textbooks were essentially worthless since
they showed no interest in syntactic phenomena of actual languages.
(And the tone of reviews in said organ generally - was it Dixon and
someone who recently had an ill-tempered exchange about one of the
former's Bumper Compendia Of Stuff?)
And back when I was wondering what exactly a "word" was anyway I ended
up at a paper-counterpaper-squib sequence between Mithrun and Sadock
about noun-incorporation (if it is that - I'm not taking sides) in
Greenlandic that was certainly far from gracious by the standards one
sees in physical sciences.
And while it's true that I've drawn heavily on the First and Second
Great Apostasies of Generativism for these examples, that doesn't
strike me as much of an objection - probably people who aren't feuding
are generally nicer, but so what when so many people are?
> > how's anyone supposed to know that Ruhlen
> > or this twit _really is_ a charlatan?
>
> This would be a trivial exercise if journalists merely took the
> trouble to check with one or two professionals before slobbering all
> over these guys, and if periodicals exercised the minimal caution of
> having their books reviewed, if at all, by people who know something
> about the subject matter.
But which ones? That Trask guy? Ah, he's down on everyone - he was
calling Chomsky's stuff despicable navel-gazing the other day, for
Heaven's sake! And you should see what he's been saying about that
nice Kristeva...
> The public prominence of these nutters is not the fault of linguists,
> who have done nothing to encourage it: it is the fault of
> irresponsible journalists who will publicize anything linguistic if it
> looks spectacular.
>
> > Are Hawking's popular books mostly reviewed by physicists? Oliver
> > Sacks's by neurologists? I've definitely seen blurb quotes by Martin
> > Amis on books by Richard Dawkins, and I'm fairly sure Amis has no
> > science background.
>
> But these are popular books, and popular books, by definition, are
> aimed at non-specialist readers. This fact raises some interesting
> issues of reviewing, which we can discuss on another occasion.
Well, scholarship in physics or chemistry doesn't typically advance in
book-length chunks, and when it does it one would expect even a
journalist to be able to accurately self-diagnose incomprehension - I
can't imagine any random journalist cheerfully reviewing
Chandrasekar's book on black holes. ("A triumph: some of the
prettiest equations the field has yet produced!" - The Daily Blah)
> Alonso's books, and Ruhlen's book on Proto-World and related topics,
> make no pretense of being popular books. They purport to be serious
> scholarly studies. There is therefore no case for allowing them to be
> reviewed by anyone other than knowledgeable professionals.
So there are four problems: these things are appearing from University
presses, linguists still write research-level books (partly because
they often don't share enough assumptions to do otherwise), everyone
thinks they can understand stuff about language, and kosher
linguistics is much less sexy than its competition.
> An example. A new biography of Yeats has just appeared, and it is
> being reviewed in the broadsheets. All the reviewers plainly know
> their stuff. All of them know a great deal about Yeats's life and
> work, about poetry in general, and about Yeats's Ireland. This is no
> more than we would expect.
And how many were competent and reputable scholars of the occult and
magick sciences on which Yeats drew so heavily to furnish his
imaginative universe?
> What would you think of a supposedly serious periodical that allowed
> this book to be reviewed by somebody who had never heard of Yeats, had
> never read any of his poems, knew nothing about poetry, and couldn't
> find Ireland on a map?
Journalism is fairly high on the list of things I take scrupulous care
to avoid taking seriously, and scientific journalism is typically so
abjectly miserable that for a long time I wouldn't read any except
that in the Economist. Life is hard!
> That's exactly what all periodicals do with books on linguistics. As
> I remarked earlier, we are discriminated against.
>
> > Of course those are science subjects and in the
> > sciences peer review usually weeds out worst of the crazies and your
> > example genres were humanities,
>
> But *plenty* of crackpottery makes it into print, in book form, on
> scientific topics.
Most of it from university presses? With reputable(ish) biologists on
board as co-authors?
> The archaeology section in Border's contains books
> on Atlantis and other lost worlds. Several years ago, I found a book
> in the physics section by some sad case who claimed he had
> carbon-dated the atmosphere and found it to be only 15,000 years old.
>
> There's no shortage of cretinous drivel in the science subjects, but
> these lunacies are very seldom reviewed at all by serious periodicals,
> and they almost never get rave reviews written by scientific
> ignoramuses. But linguistics gets treated differently.
>
> > but for some reason lots of people think linguistics is a kind of
> > science (even this group is called sci.lang!) and apparently
> > assume it's capable of keeping its own house in order.
>
> We do keep our house in order.
You do? And this Chomsky person of despicable navel-gazing fits in
how? He is, as I'm sure you'll be delighted to be reminded, said to
be in the _all time_ Top Ten of authors cited in the humanities, and
has been the dominant figure in (at least the public perception of)
linguistics for, what, 40 years or so now? (Suspicious in its own
right, if you ask me, but people so often don't.)
Shall I mention Kristeva again, too, or should we just agree that
that's a French thing?
> Nobody in linguistics pays any attention to these crackpots, just as
> nobody in physics pays any attention to people who try to
> carbon-date the atmosphere.
>
> But the journalists treat us differently from the other disciplines.
Linguistics looks different from other disciplines to me, too. More
constructively, have you tried pitching a Ruhlen slagfest to the NYRB?
They used to host the big Dawkins (et al.) vs. Gould (et al.)
slugfests back in the day, IIRC, and they've hosted Searle vs. The
Rest Of The World, too.
Des
would like Ruhlen to get what he has coming, for sure
--
"[T]he structural trend in linguistics which took root with the
International Congresses of the twenties and early thirties [...] had
close and effective connections with phenomenology in its Husserlian
and Hegelian versions." -- Roman Jakobson
jrr...@hotmail.com
misunderstood about the regard that Jorge Alonso García has in Spain.
lar...@sussex.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote in message
> The Spanish "scholar" Jorge Alonso maintains a vast home page
> detailing his important contributions to linguistics and other
> disciplines, though his qualifications appear to consist of little
> more than a few years of working in the personnel office for IBM and
> Kodak, plus a diving certificate. Still, he has published several
> books in which he finds Basque under the bed. Apparently Iberian is
> Basque, Minoan is Basque, Etruscan is Basque, and so on.
....
> Why am I bothering to recount these imbecilities? Because they are
> taken seriously. All of Alonso's books are published by a prestigious
> Spanish university press. One of them is co-authored by a prominent
> Spanish geneticist who believes that his genetic maps support Alonso's
> conclusions.
Of course Alonso García isn't any kind of "scholar" (I think he has
a degree in History by a Open University .... though as a matter of
fact nowadays from any Spanish University the students could easily
get a Humanities degree learning virtually nothing), but his co-autor
Arnaiz Villena not only is a executive of an important Hospital, but
also is medicine professor ("catedrático") in the Universidad
Complutense. I think he is the reason that Alonso García publishes in
the Editorial Complutense (by the way, does anybody knows some review
on the genetic work of Arnaiz?, his sampling looks too little and
ill-designed to me, but I am not a geneticist).
Professor De Hoz is the expert on this subject in the Universidad
Complutense, and it's not "happy" with this situation; he published a
devastating review in the issue of April 28th 1999 of "De Libros". You
could also read my "opinion" at
http://www.webpersonal.net/jrr/ib8_en.htm
(by the way, at the colloquium, already published, that organized
Arnaiz and Alonso, also took part Merrit Ruhlen...)
Nevertheless the very sad thing is that another "magic translator",
Román del Cerro, do is a university professor (or was, as I can't find
him in the list of teachers of the Universidad de Alicante) and I
remember to have read among the bibliography of his subjects his book
on Iberian as Basque. May I beg a minute's silence for the suffering
of his students to have had to read it and to learnt it?
there is also a page on a course directed by Roman
http://elguanche.net/toponimiaantigua2.htm
> Alonso's Etruscan book received glowing reviews in some supposedly
> serious newspapers, including Le Monde and the Times of London -- and
> the Times went so far as to contribute an editorial commenting on the
> importance of Alonso's work.
>
> Now, no respectable periodical would allow a book on, say, history or
> literature to be reviewed by somebody who is utterly ignorant of the
> subject. But linguistics is different: *any* oaf is allowed to review
> a book on linguistics, and to pronounce it a scholarly triumph even
> when it consists entirely of brain-dead garbage.
>
> We are discriminated against.
Unfortunately I don't think that we are discriminated, it can be
extended to many other subjects.
J. Rodríguez Ramos
Alan Hogue
>Des Small <des....@bristol.ac.uk> wrote in message news:<yyrjbrt1...@pc156.maths.bris.ac.uk>...
>
>[LT]
>
>
>
>>>We are discriminated against.
>>>
>>>
>
>
>
>>Given that the natural mode of communication of linguists appears to
>>be polemical denunciation,
>>
>>
>
>Hardly. How much communication between linguists have you seen?
>
>
>
>>how's anyone supposed to know that Ruhlen
>>or this twit _really is_ a charlatan?
>>
>>
>
>This would be a trivial exercise if journalists merely took the
>trouble to check with one or two professionals before slobbering all
>over these guys, and if periodicals exercised the minimal caution of
>having their books reviewed, if at all, by people who know something
>about the subject matter.
>
>The public prominence of these nutters is not the fault of linguists,
>who have done nothing to encourage it: it is the fault of
>irresponsible journalists who will publicize anything linguistic if it
>looks spectacular.
>
>
>
Isn't it also due, in part, to the fact that language can be such a
politically charged subject (therefore encouraging disingenuous
quackery), coupled with the competence people assume they have in the
subject merely because they speak a language?
Alan H.
jallan
> Ross Clark wrote:
> >
> > "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
> > news:3F7AD8...@worldnet.att.net...
>
> > > From: Peter T. Daniels [mailto:gram...@worldnet.att.net]
> > > Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2003 10:00 AM
> > > To: ny&co
> > > Subject: Language Visible
> > >
> > > least mysterious, and any scholar of writing systems could have given
> > > you the answer.
What David Sacks writes on page 2 is:
<< Amazingly, with the sole exception of Korea's Hangul script
(invented in isolation in the mid 1400s A.D.), all of today's
alphabetic scripts have a common origin. >>
This is the only mention of the Korean Hangul script that I find.
Sacks does *not* indicate that its background is mysterious.
> > > Why he claims that the English and Hebrew alphabetic orders are "35% the
> > > same" is an utter mystery -- they're virtually identical, and for every
> > > "discrepancy," there's a simple explanation.
I can't find this claim at all in the book, certainly not in the first
75 pages which is all you claim to have read.
I don't find *any* mention of comparison of English and Hebrew as "35%
the same".
> > > On p. 50 he says that the ancient sound of Aleph was glottal stop -- but
> > > when he tried to demonstrate it for you, it turned out he doesn't know
> > > what a glottal stop is! He was using a "ch" (German) sound -- Kaph
> > > without dagesh, or ancient Het, perhaps -- which was totally wrong.
From page 50:
<< _Aleph_ represented a faint consonantal sound common in Semitic
tongues but rare in modern English, what linguists call a glottal
stop. The classic English example occurs in London's Cockney accent,
in the swallowing of the "t" sound of the word "bottle": "bah-owe". A
glottal stop is thus a catch in the throat, from which a following
vowel sound pushes off.
Insofar as each Semitic letter name began with the very sound that
the letter symbolized, the name _aleph_ actually began with a glottal
stop, a bit of throat before the "a". This fact is hard to render in
our own spelling. But some modern scholars print the letter name as
_'aleph_ (alternatively _'alef_ or _'alep_), where the mark _'_ is an
international phonetic symbol for the glottal stop. >>
Not very clear but not inaccurate. No Cockney inserts the German _ch_
sound into the pronunciation of _bottle_! The German _ch_ sound is
*not* made in the throat. The glottal stop is made in the throat.
Sacks describes "a catch in the throat".
The fault is in your reading, not in anything that Sacks wrote.
> > > And so on. I was cringing behind the wheel of my car.
Why?
Judging only from this review I would say you are far less _accurate_
than Sacks. *Every* claim you have made is inaccurate.
Sacks is unforunately weak on the sounds of Semitic emphatics and
doesn't explain them properly, probably because he doesn't understand
them. Yet his efforts are far better than the completely wrong sounds
that appear in Marc-Alain Ouaknin's horrible _Mysteries of the
Alphabet: The Origins of Writing_. Ouaknin seems to believe that the
modern Hebrew sounds are the sounds that the letters always possessed,
indicating once again that a degree and a professorial position in a
discipline doesn't mean a person isn't a fraud or crank.
I found Sacks' book otherwise accurate in all issues where I have
abilitity to evaluate what he was writing and a pleasure to read as
well. I found it delightful that a book written is such a light tone
contained so much accurate scholarship.
Jim Allan
Peter T. Daniels
>
> "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message news:<3F7BAD...@worldnet.att.net>...
> > Ross Clark wrote:
> > >
> > > "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
> > > news:3F7AD8...@worldnet.att.net...
> >
> > > > -----Original Message-----
> > > > From: Peter T. Daniels [mailto:gram...@worldnet.att.net]
> > > > Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2003 10:00 AM
> > > > To: ny&co
> > > > Subject: Language Visible
> > > >
> > > > Questions like the background of the Korean alphabet are not in the
> > > > least mysterious, and any scholar of writing systems could have given
> > > > you the answer.
>
> What David Sacks writes on page 2 is:
>
> << Amazingly, with the sole exception of Korea's Hangul script
> (invented in isolation in the mid 1400s A.D.), all of today's
> alphabetic scripts have a common origin. >>
>
> This is the only mention of the Korean Hangul script that I find.
> Sacks does *not* indicate that its background is mysterious.
You seem to have overlooked the fact that I was discussing a radio
interview, not the book. You can hear it for yourself at
http://www.wnyc.org .
Lennie asked him why Korean is so different from Chinese, and he hadn't
any idea.
> > > > Why he claims that the English and Hebrew alphabetic orders are "35% the
> > > > same" is an utter mystery -- they're virtually identical, and for every
> > > > "discrepancy," there's a simple explanation.
>
> I can't find this claim at all in the book, certainly not in the first
> 75 pages which is all you claim to have read.
>
> I don't find *any* mention of comparison of English and Hebrew as "35%
> the same".
You seem to have overlooked the fact that I was discussing a radio
interview, not the book.
> > > > On p. 50 he says that the ancient sound of Aleph was glottal stop -- but
> > > > when he tried to demonstrate it for you, it turned out he doesn't know
> > > > what a glottal stop is! He was using a "ch" (German) sound -- Kaph
> > > > without dagesh, or ancient Het, perhaps -- which was totally wrong.
>
> From page 50:
>
> << _Aleph_ represented a faint consonantal sound common in Semitic
> tongues but rare in modern English, what linguists call a glottal
> stop. The classic English example occurs in London's Cockney accent,
> in the swallowing of the "t" sound of the word "bottle": "bah-owe". A
> glottal stop is thus a catch in the throat, from which a following
> vowel sound pushes off.
> Insofar as each Semitic letter name began with the very sound that
> the letter symbolized, the name _aleph_ actually began with a glottal
> stop, a bit of throat before the "a". This fact is hard to render in
> our own spelling. But some modern scholars print the letter name as
> _'aleph_ (alternatively _'alef_ or _'alep_), where the mark _'_ is an
> international phonetic symbol for the glottal stop. >>
>
> Not very clear but not inaccurate. No Cockney inserts the German _ch_
> sound into the pronunciation of _bottle_! The German _ch_ sound is
> *not* made in the throat. The glottal stop is made in the throat.
> Sacks describes "a catch in the throat".
>
> The fault is in your reading, not in anything that Sacks wrote.
You seem to have overlooked the fact that I was discussing a radio
interview, not the book.
> > > > And so on. I was cringing behind the wheel of my car.
>
> Why?
You seem to have overlooked the fact that I was discussing a radio
interview, not the book.
> Judging only from this review I would say you are far less _accurate_
> than Sacks. *Every* claim you have made is inaccurate.
You seem to have overlooked the fact that I was discussing a radio
interview, not the book.
> Sacks is unforunately weak on the sounds of Semitic emphatics and
> doesn't explain them properly, probably because he doesn't understand
> them. Yet his efforts are far better than the completely wrong sounds
> that appear in Marc-Alain Ouaknin's horrible _Mysteries of the
> Alphabet: The Origins of Writing_. Ouaknin seems to believe that the
> modern Hebrew sounds are the sounds that the letters always possessed,
> indicating once again that a degree and a professorial position in a
> discipline doesn't mean a person isn't a fraud or crank.
See my review of Ouaknin's book (and Shlain's and three others; Man's
wasn't out yet) in *Sino-Platonic Papers* 98 (Jan. 2000): 47-57.
> I found Sacks' book otherwise accurate in all issues where I have
> abilitity to evaluate what he was writing and a pleasure to read as
> well. I found it delightful that a book written is such a light tone
> contained so much accurate scholarship.
Kindly inform us as to your credentials for commenting on a work on
writing systems.
And also of your criteria for "pleasure to read."
I hope you're better at reading books than you are at reading newsgroup
postings.
Douglas G. Kilday
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message ...
>
> [...]
>
> But there is no Etruscan abecedary that doesn't include <B D G>, and
> there is no Etruscan inscription that uses any of them.
Have you had your second cup of coffee yet? The <G> of the archaic
abecedaria, i.e. Greek gamma, was used in the earliest written Etruscan to
denote the allophone of /k/ before /e/ and /i/, and is conventionally
transcribed <c>. When <K> and <Q> were dropped, gamma became the regular way
of denoting /k/ in South Etruscan, and remained as such until the language
became extinct.
I'm sure you know all this already. Just think about the origin of <C>.
DGK
Des Small
> The new Wall Street Borders (which replaces the WTC one) keeps its two
> shelves of linguistics smack dab in the middle of the New Age &
> Mysticism sections. While taking advantage of the opening-day discounts
> I brought this to the attention of two managerial-looking persons
> (including the one stationed by the cash register lines who was
> soliciting comments), and they both said it was a matter of space
> allocation -- they'd try to fit it into the Social Sciences at some
> point.
>
> That was in June IIRC. Last week I went there again and they hadn't
> moved a thing.
That's interesting - our Borders (hoorah!) here has linguistics in an
annexe to western philosophy, which contains nothing more egregious
than Hegel. I had always (i.e., since we got one earlier this year)
sort of thought that the floor plan must be beamed down from the
Corporate Mothership.
I still think the book selection must be, because I work in the only
university maths department in town, and I'm pretty sure there's
nobody here that would be interested in some of the more esoteric
works in that section, and I'm pretty surer that nobody in town but
not here would. Or maybe they just pin publishers' calalogues to a
dartboard and have at it...
Des
remembers Folyes's stochastic shelving scheme.
Larry Trask
> I'd like to add some specification to L. Trask message, as it could be
> misunderstood about the regard that Jorge Alonso García has in Spain.
> Of course Alonso García isn't any kind of "scholar" (I think he has
> a degree in History by a Open University .... though as a matter of
> fact nowadays from any Spanish University the students could easily
> get a Humanities degree learning virtually nothing), but his co-autor
> Arnaiz Villena not only is a executive of an important Hospital, but
> also is medicine professor ("catedrático") in the Universidad
> Complutense. I think he is the reason that Alonso García publishes in
> the Editorial Complutense (by the way, does anybody knows some review
> on the genetic work of Arnaiz?, his sampling looks too little and
> ill-designed to me, but I am not a geneticist).
>
> Professor De Hoz is the expert on this subject in the Universidad
> Complutense, and it's not "happy" with this situation; he published a
> devastating review in the issue of April 28th 1999 of "De Libros". You
> could also read my "opinion" at
> http://www.webpersonal.net/jrr/ib8_en.htm
I am very glad to hear about this. Professor De Hoz ia a serious
scholar, and I welcome all attempts at combating this crud.
> (by the way, at the colloquium, already published, that organized
> Arnaiz and Alonso, also took part Merrit Ruhlen...)
Ah...why am I not surprised?
> Nevertheless the very sad thing is that another "magic translator",
> Román del Cerro, do is a university professor (or was, as I can't find
> him in the list of teachers of the Universidad de Alicante) and I
> remember to have read among the bibliography of his subjects his book
> on Iberian as Basque. May I beg a minute's silence for the suffering
> of his students to have had to read it and to learnt it?
Yes; this is indeed a tragedy. Sci.lang-ers, I haven't mentioned
Román del Cerro, but he is yet another prominent producer of Basque
loony tunes. It's horrifying to think that he teaches students. But
then the anthropology department at Stanford has apparently given
Ruhlen a part-time teaching job, and that's every bit as horrifying.
> there is also a page on a course directed by Roman
> http://elguanche.net/toponimiaantigua2.htm
Wonderful! As soon as I can get my hands on some brandy, I'll dare to
have a look at it.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Larry Trask
Des, your posting is gigantic, and I can only manage to comment on a
few points.
> > Hardly. How much communication between linguists have you seen?
>
> Well, some. Annoyingly, my university's library doesn't have _The
> linguistics wars_, so I've probably missed out on the best stuff, but
> I'm sure you saw John Lawler's linguist list review:
> <http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-644.html>
Ah, but that's purely the Chomskyans, and the rest of us were not
involved. It's also ancient history. Since the late 1970s, the
Chomskyans have settled down. They now agree that Chomsky is the
fount of all wisdom, that Chomsky is more infallible than the Pope,
that no word of Chomsky's can be questioned.
> Or there's Gary Gazdar in interview:
> <http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/lab/nlp/gazdar/briscoe/conclusion.html>
Gerald Gazdar.
> """
> If you think about funding linguistics departments in universities so
> that they do the work necessary to describe natural languages and to
> theorize about the nature of natural languages in a way that
> constitutes a contribution to scientific knowledge, then linguistics
> departments patently don't do that. That's not where the brownie
> points are. A lot of it is hermetic, it's not actually of any use to
> anyone else. It's a closed internal system.
>
> If I was charged with university funding, I would pull the plug.
You are talking only about Chomskyans again. Most linguists are not
Chomskyans, and most departments do not waste their time in Chomskyan
pursuits. The Chomskyans are a minoritry, but, once again, they get
practically all the attention, because they are the ones making the
most spectacular claims -- though on the basis of the least evidence,
of course.
Des, it is a *bad* mistake to assume that Chomskyan vaporizing is
typical of linguistics generally.
> <http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/lab/nlp/gazdar/briscoe/linguistics.html>
> """
> EJB So, to somebody coming into the field, offered a job in a
> linguistics department, what would you say?
>
> GG Learn how to use a computer and change department.
> """
>
> (Note in particular that the question said nothing about Chomsky,
> generativeness or syntax; just "linguistics department".)
Gerald Gazdar is a colleague of mine here at Sussex, and I know him
well. Gerald adopts a dry, ironic style, and you have to understand
that in appreciating his comments. Here Gerald is talking about
himself: he switched from general linguistics to computational
linguistics. But he still does linguistics; he still turns out at
seminars on general linguistics; and I can assure you that he has
great respect for real linguistics.
[snip long quote from Sag on Chomsky and his pernicious influence]
I agree with every word Ivan Sag says here. But you knew that.
[snip anecdotes illustrating the bad temper of certain linguistic
exchanges]
> And back when I was wondering what exactly a "word" was anyway I ended
> up at a paper-counterpaper-squib sequence between Mithrun and Sadock
> about noun-incorporation (if it is that - I'm not taking sides) in
> Greenlandic that was certainly far from gracious by the standards one
> sees in physical sciences.
That's "Mithun". I know Marianne Mithun, and she's a lovely person.
I don't know Sadock, so I can't comment.
But, Des -- "far from gracious by the standards one sees in physical
sciences"? Where have you bewen living? It is a matter of record
that exchanges in the physical (and biological) sciences are sometimes
ill-tempered, snotty, and excessively rude. On occasion, scientists
get so huffy they stop speaking to each other.
I was an organic chemist before I became a linguist, and I've seen
both worlds from the inside. Linguists are in no way more
ill-tempered than academics in any other field.
> And while it's true that I've drawn heavily on the First and Second
> Great Apostasies of Generativism for these examples, that doesn't
> strike me as much of an objection - probably people who aren't feuding
> are generally nicer, but so what when so many people are?
A misconception. At the moment, the feuds in linguistics are few and
localized, and they do not compare in number or magnitude with the
feuds raging in some other fields.
Sorry; I have to stop now. I've got work to do.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Des Small
> Des Small <des....@bristol.ac.uk> wrote in message
> news:<yyrjwubn...@pc156.maths.bris.ac.uk>...
>
> Des, your posting is gigantic, and I can only manage to comment on a
> few points.
Hm. It didn't include all that many distinct points, there was just
evidence to support them (almost all of it from pointers that I could
pull off the top of my head).
> > > Hardly. How much communication between linguists have you seen?
> >
> > Well, some. Annoyingly, my university's library doesn't have _The
> > linguistics wars_, so I've probably missed out on the best stuff, but
> > I'm sure you saw John Lawler's linguist list review:
> > <http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-644.html>
>
> Ah, but that's purely the Chomskyans, and the rest of us were not
> involved. It's also ancient history. Since the late 1970s, the
> Chomskyans have settled down. They now agree that Chomsky is the
> fount of all wisdom, that Chomsky is more infallible than the Pope,
> that no word of Chomsky's can be questioned.
I take it that means the people who sided with His Supreme Highness in both
revolutions (counting the HPSG as a second distinct one).
[...]
> Des, it is a *bad* mistake to assume that Chomskyan vaporizing is
> typical of linguistics generally.
It would be. Another review in _Linguist_ was of a "survey" of the
state of the art in phonology, in that each of the major currents got
a chapter to explain why there school was right and all the others
were wrong. The reviewer said (this is all from unreliable memory,
sadly) that you wouldn't give it to a neophyte because they'd be
forced to conclude that phonologists couldn't agree about anything,
and weren't very nice about doing so.
[...]
> > And back when I was wondering what exactly a "word" was anyway I ended
> > up at a paper-counterpaper-squib sequence between Mithrun and Sadock
> > about noun-incorporation (if it is that - I'm not taking sides) in
> > Greenlandic that was certainly far from gracious by the standards one
> > sees in physical sciences.
>
> That's "Mithun". I know Marianne Mithun,
Oops.
> and she's a lovely person. I don't know Sadock, so I can't comment.
I originally called the style "polemical denunciation", but I didn't
say or mean to imply that they were denouncing each other
_personally_, just that they gave the impression they had no time at
all for each others' _theories_. For all I know they're best mates
and both do a lot of work for charity.
> But, Des -- "far from gracious by the standards one sees in physical
> sciences"? Where have you bewen living? It is a matter of record
> that exchanges in the physical (and biological) sciences are sometimes
> ill-tempered, snotty, and excessively rude. On occasion, scientists
> get so huffy they stop speaking to each other.
For sure, there's lots of politics and lots of feuding and lots of ill
will. That's not what I'm talking about though: in most sciences you
_really can_ refute stuff by demonstrating that its wrong, so there
isn't the same tendency to have protracted "is! isn't!" style
arguments. Linguistics often has these, maths very rarely does.
[...]
> > And while it's true that I've drawn heavily on the First and Second
> > Great Apostasies of Generativism for these examples, that doesn't
> > strike me as much of an objection - probably people who aren't feuding
> > are generally nicer, but so what when so many people are?
>
> A misconception. At the moment, the feuds in linguistics are few and
> localized, and they do not compare in number or magnitude with the
> feuds raging in some other fields.
Is there a non-trivial consensus among phonologists? Do functionalist
syntacticians talk to either flavour of ex-Chomskyan? (If you want to
claim that neither phonology or syntax are really all that important
parts of linguistics we do have irreconcilable differences.)
I can well believe that most of the kinds of linguistics that go on
are sensible, scrupulous and scholarly, especially historical
linguistics which has developed relatively untraumatically out of the
work of the neogrammarians, by which I certainly don't mean that the
techniques haven't evolved. (I say this based on a French book by J-E
Boltanski which didn't emphasise that point.)
But the rival Universalist emphasis in linguistics which can be traced
back at least to von Humboldt is the one that interests me more. I
want linguistics to be a science of language that takes its place
within the sciences of man and aspires to explain the whole
languageiness of language, and that's probably why Chomsky looms
larger in my world view than yours - it's _my_ tradition he's
hijacked, and (I happen to think) he's rubbish at it. That means my
vision of what linguistics is about and what it should be doing (which
I claim to have largely inherited from Jakobson) makes it infeasible
to just go off and play quietly with some nice etymologies.
Des
is unmoved by many forms of hypheno-linguistics, too.
Peter T. Daniels
Did you miss the part where I said they kept the letters in the alphabet
and passed them on to the Romans?
Peter T. Daniels
>
> "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> writes:
>
> > The new Wall Street Borders (which replaces the WTC one) keeps its two
> > shelves of linguistics smack dab in the middle of the New Age &
> > Mysticism sections. While taking advantage of the opening-day discounts
> > I brought this to the attention of two managerial-looking persons
> > (including the one stationed by the cash register lines who was
> > soliciting comments), and they both said it was a matter of space
> > allocation -- they'd try to fit it into the Social Sciences at some
> > point.
> >
> > That was in June IIRC. Last week I went there again and they hadn't
> > moved a thing.
>
> That's interesting - our Borders (hoorah!) here has linguistics in an
> annexe to western philosophy, which contains nothing more egregious
> than Hegel. I had always (i.e., since we got one earlier this year)
> sort of thought that the floor plan must be beamed down from the
> Corporate Mothership.
Barnes & Noble still puts linguistics next to philosophy, but over the
winter Borders moved it alongside archeology and anthropology.
You have Borders? I thought Blackwell and Waterstone already had blanket
coverage! (I came back to Chicago in October 1992 wishing we had
Waterstone, and lo and behold, there they were! But they were gone by
the time I left in 1997. Chicago was the initial battleground for the
three chains, B, B&N, and Crown Books. Crown Books lost. So did several
excellent independents.)
> I still think the book selection must be, because I work in the only
> university maths department in town, and I'm pretty sure there's
> nobody here that would be interested in some of the more esoteric
> works in that section, and I'm pretty surer that nobody in town but
> not here would. Or maybe they just pin publishers' calalogues to a
> dartboard and have at it...
>
> Des
> remembers Folyes's stochastic shelving scheme.
I don't.
Peter T. Daniels
>
> Des Small <des....@bristol.ac.uk> wrote in message news:<yyrjwubn...@pc156.maths.bris.ac.uk>...
>
> Des, your posting is gigantic, and I can only manage to comment on a
> few points.
>
> > > Hardly. How much communication between linguists have you seen?
> >
> > Well, some. Annoyingly, my university's library doesn't have _The
> > linguistics wars_, so I've probably missed out on the best stuff, but
> > I'm sure you saw John Lawler's linguist list review:
> > <http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-644.html>
>
> Ah, but that's purely the Chomskyans, and the rest of us were not
> involved. It's also ancient history. Since the late 1970s, the
> Chomskyans have settled down. They now agree that Chomsky is the
> fount of all wisdom, that Chomsky is more infallible than the Pope,
> that no word of Chomsky's can be questioned.
Um, Jim McCawley would strenuously object to being called a Chomskyan
(see John Lawler's beautiful obituary, now out in *Language*), and I
imagine Lakoff would, too; Ross saw the light a bit later, but now he
does poetics and stuff.
> > And back when I was wondering what exactly a "word" was anyway I ended
> > up at a paper-counterpaper-squib sequence between Mithrun and Sadock
> > about noun-incorporation (if it is that - I'm not taking sides) in
> > Greenlandic that was certainly far from gracious by the standards one
> > sees in physical sciences.
>
> That's "Mithun". I know Marianne Mithun, and she's a lovely person.
> I don't know Sadock, so I can't comment.
He is, too.
Peter T. Daniels
> > > And back when I was wondering what exactly a "word" was anyway I ended
> > > up at a paper-counterpaper-squib sequence between Mithrun and Sadock
> > > about noun-incorporation (if it is that - I'm not taking sides) in
> > > Greenlandic that was certainly far from gracious by the standards one
> > > sees in physical sciences.
> >
> > That's "Mithun". I know Marianne Mithun,
>
> Oops.
>
> > and she's a lovely person. I don't know Sadock, so I can't comment.
>
> I originally called the style "polemical denunciation", but I didn't
> say or mean to imply that they were denouncing each other
> _personally_, just that they gave the impression they had no time at
> all for each others' _theories_. For all I know they're best mates
> and both do a lot of work for charity.
Well, she's in Santa Barbara and he's in Chicago ...
He's the one who one day in class mentioned a test for wordhood -- if
you make a mistake in the middle you have to go back to the beginning
and start over, and in Greenlandic, that can be quite a far way back to
go.
Des Small
> Des Small wrote:
> >
> > "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> writes:
> >
> > > The new Wall Street Borders (which replaces the WTC one) keeps its two
> > > shelves of linguistics smack dab in the middle of the New Age &
> > > Mysticism sections. While taking advantage of the opening-day discounts
> > > I brought this to the attention of two managerial-looking persons
> > > (including the one stationed by the cash register lines who was
> > > soliciting comments), and they both said it was a matter of space
> > > allocation -- they'd try to fit it into the Social Sciences at some
> > > point.
> > >
> > > That was in June IIRC. Last week I went there again and they hadn't
> > > moved a thing.
> >
> > That's interesting - our Borders (hoorah!) here has linguistics in an
> > annexe to western philosophy, which contains nothing more egregious
> > than Hegel. I had always (i.e., since we got one earlier this year)
> > sort of thought that the floor plan must be beamed down from the
> > Corporate Mothership.
>
> Barnes & Noble still puts linguistics next to philosophy, but over the
> winter Borders moved it alongside archeology and anthropology.
>
> You have Borders? I thought Blackwell and Waterstone already had blanket
> coverage!
You can never have too many blankets and the winters can be cold.
London has had Borderses for a while, but Bristol only recently got
one. It's a stones throw from the Blackwells and maybe 5 minutes walk
from the University's Waterstones.
[...]
> > Des
> > remembers Folyes's stochastic shelving scheme.
>
> I don't.
Within departments (including fiction) they used to file by
*publisher*. Presumably for the benefit of all those people who came
in saying, "Well, I'm not really fussed what it's about or who it's by
as long as it's from Cambridge University Press."
Then you used to have to take the book to the counter, and swap it for
a slip to take to the cashiers somewhere else altogether, pay and get
it stamped and bring it back to swap back for the book again.
Des
is not given to nostalgia, especially about the past.
Peter T. Daniels
> > > Des
> > > remembers Folyes's stochastic shelving scheme.
> >
> > I don't.
>
> Within departments (including fiction) they used to file by
> *publisher*. Presumably for the benefit of all those people who came
> in saying, "Well, I'm not really fussed what it's about or who it's by
> as long as it's from Cambridge University Press."
>
> Then you used to have to take the book to the counter, and swap it for
> a slip to take to the cashiers somewhere else altogether, pay and get
> it stamped and bring it back to swap back for the book again.
>
> Des
> is not given to nostalgia, especially about the past.
Ah -- it was a bookseller, not a theoretician of classification like
Melvil Dewey or S. R. Ranganathan. (See my contribution to the 1993
[Chicago] LACUS Forum, which also carries Jim McCawley's proposal to
study variations in grammaticality judgments as a linguistic datum.)
(Actually, that sounds something like the Soviet system of shopping,
no?)
Merlijn De Smit
Definitely, if the quackery in question happens to fit with a certain
political paradigm. No one is going to find Edo Nyland«s writings
particularly useful from that respect, but Marrism in the former
Soviet Union is another kettle of fish. Once you're dealing with
gigantic Urheimats or linguistic relationships to whatever high,
ancient, mysterious culture one fancies (Hungaro-Sumerian comparisons
would fit nicely here), then the fact that the quackery is of a type
people really like to hear will get it a larger foothold in the media.
Just today I was sent a link to an interesting paper by Konrad Koerner
on the subject: "Linguistics and ideology in the study of language."
You can find it at: http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/LangIdeo/Koerner/Koerner.html
(thanks to the guy who put it on his webpage).
Merlijn de Smit
Merlijn De Smit
Small correction to my previous reply (I'll bet this one will show up
on google earlier though): The Koerner paper I linked to deals with
political influence on serious (historical) linguistics, not quackery.
Nonetheless it's interesting.
M.
Brian M. Scott
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in
news:3F7D7C...@worldnet.att.net in sci.lang:
> Des Small wrote:
[...]
>> That's interesting - our Borders (hoorah!) here has
>> linguistics in an annexe to western philosophy, which
>> contains nothing more egregious than Hegel. I had always
>> (i.e., since we got one earlier this year) sort of thought
>> that the floor plan must be beamed down from the Corporate
>> Mothership.
> Barnes & Noble still puts linguistics next to philosophy,
> but over the winter Borders moved it alongside archeology
> and anthropology.
One of mine has it next to the Judaica, if I remember
correctly; the other I think has it next to religion.
[...]
>> remembers Folyes's stochastic shelving scheme.
Think of it as an invitation to serendipity.
[...]
Brian
John Lawler
>> Des Small <des....@bristol.ac.uk> writes
>> Des, your posting is gigantic, and I can only manage to comment on a
>> few points.
>> > > Hardly. How much communication between linguists have you seen?
>> > Well, some. Annoyingly, my university's library doesn't have _The
>> > linguistics wars_, so I've probably missed out on the best stuff, but
>> > I'm sure you saw John Lawler's linguist list review:
>> > <http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-644.html>
>> Ah, but that's purely the Chomskyans, and the rest of us were not
>> involved. It's also ancient history. Since the late 1970s, the
>> Chomskyans have settled down. They now agree that Chomsky is the
>> fount of all wisdom, that Chomsky is more infallible than the Pope,
>> that no word of Chomsky's can be questioned.
>Um, Jim McCawley would strenuously object to being called a Chomskyan
>(see John Lawler's beautiful obituary, now out in *Language*), and I
>imagine Lakoff would, too; Ross saw the light a bit later, but now he
>does poetics and stuff.
Why, thank you, Peter.
For those of you who haven't received your copies yet (I just got mine
yesterday), it's on the Web at http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/McCawley-Lg.pdf
Hardest thing I ever wrote.
I think Jim's position would be a bit more complex than whether or not he
was a 'Chomskyan'. That's kind of like trying to decide whether Adler or
Jung were 'Freudians'. Clearly he was generativist, but he didn't try to
follow the twists and turns of fashion. He kept his eye and his path
firmly fixed on Chomsky's original goals of observational, descriptional,
and -- when possible -- explanatory adequacy.
I've often thought the difference is rather like that between Windows and
UNIX. Every 4 or 5 years there's a New! Improved! version of Windows that
doesn't fix the old bugs, but does gives you new ones instead, is
incompatible with most familiar stuff, insists on doing things you don't
want done, and makes you have to figure out ways around it to do the
things you do want done. And costs a bundle and makes you have to teach
yourself and other people a whole new set of tricks. Kind of like having
to run a brand-new hastily-constructed kitchen sink factory with untrained
personnel a couple of times every decade.
By contrast, there's the various flavors of UNIX, which by and large has
just been incrementally improved for 3 decades, where everything that ever
worked still works, only better and easier, where there aren't any serious
bugs left to fix, where upward compatibility and portability are fetishes,
and where a well-matched and professionally useful set of Tools is the
guiding metaphor.
I do have to add, though, that -- while I went yessing through both Des's
and Larry's postings, and agree with most of what they say -- I suspect
the situation in the US is rather more the way Des describes it than
Larry, and the only time I've talked with UK linguists recently (last year
at UCL) it looked and sounded to me like my colleagues considered The
Established Religion to be pretty firmly on top. Certainly it is in the
States.
We *are* discriminated against -- Larry's right -- but it's our own damn
fault to a greater extent than we like to admit, for treating damn fool
ideas with so much reverence. In Walt Kelly's immortal phrase, "We have
met the enemy, and he is us."
That's one more reason why I miss Jim McCawley so much.
-John Lawler -- http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/ -- UM Linguistics Dept
--------------------------------------------------------------------
"Academic integrity still plagues campus" -- Headline, University of
Michigan Daily 11/12/02
Peter T. Daniels
>
> On 03 Oct 2003 "Peter T. Daniels"
> <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in
> news:3F7D7C...@worldnet.att.net in sci.lang:
>
> > Des Small wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> >> That's interesting - our Borders (hoorah!) here has
> >> linguistics in an annexe to western philosophy, which
> >> contains nothing more egregious than Hegel. I had always
> >> (i.e., since we got one earlier this year) sort of thought
> >> that the floor plan must be beamed down from the Corporate
> >> Mothership.
>
> > Barnes & Noble still puts linguistics next to philosophy,
> > but over the winter Borders moved it alongside archeology
> > and anthropology.
>
> One of mine has it next to the Judaica, if I remember
> correctly; the other I think has it next to religion.
All the NY-area ones seem to move in lockstep; I wonder if they're all a
single franchise? or are they still controlled from Ann Arbor? (The WTC
personnel were moved to Park Avenue, which soon improved vastly. The WTC
personnel don't seem to have been moved back downtown, though.)
Greg Lee
...
> I think Jim's position would be a bit more complex than whether or not he
> was a 'Chomskyan'. That's kind of like trying to decide whether Adler or
No, I don't think so. He said he's not doing generative grammar at the
beginning of SPHE2, and all his remarks there about generative grammar are
disparaging.
--
Greg Lee <gr...@ling.lll.hawaii.edu>
John Lawler
>John Lawler <jla...@umich.edu> writes:
>> I think Jim's position would be a bit more complex than whether or not he
>> was a 'Chomskyan'. That's kind of like trying to decide whether Adler or
>> Jung were 'Freudians'. Clearly he was generativist, ...
>No, I don't think so. He said he's not doing generative grammar at the
>beginning of SPHE2, and all his remarks there about generative grammar are
>disparaging.
That's a great example of what too many people still refer to as "mere
semantics".
Jim used constituents, surface structures, derivations, the cycle, and
transformations. American Structuralism it ain't. If you don't want to
call it officially 'generative', that's fine with me. But it was clearly
in the Chomskyan tradition, whatever one wants to call it.
For precisely these reasons (which he referred to as 'truth in labelling')
Jim refused to use *any* label for his theory. As he put it (at
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/depts/linguistics/faculty/mccawley.html),
"1. Syntax (of English, and when native speakers are available to be
exploited, also Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and Hindi), within the
revisionist version of transformational grammar that I operate in
(and to which I refuse to give a name - if you feel you need a name
for it, go and make one up), which exploits what I regard as the
fruitful ideas of transformational grammar (constituency, multiple
syntactic strata, the cyclic principle) and chucks out what I regard
as counterproductive ideas (the metaphor of a "base" structure, the
idea of categories and structures as remaining constant throughout
derivations, the fetish for keeping syntax and semantics separate)."
Labels are just labels.
It's the product that counts, not the packaging.
-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler Michigan Linguistics
------------------------------------------------------------
"Ordnung gibt es heutzutage meistens dort, wo nichts ist.
Es ist eine Mangelerscheinung." -- Bertolt Brecht
Larry Trask
[LT]
> > Des, it is a *bad* mistake to assume that Chomskyan vaporizing is
> > typical of linguistics generally.
>
> It would be. Another review in _Linguist_ was of a "survey" of the
> state of the art in phonology, in that each of the major currents got
> a chapter to explain why there school was right and all the others
> were wrong. The reviewer said (this is all from unreliable memory,
> sadly) that you wouldn't give it to a neophyte because they'd be
> forced to conclude that phonologists couldn't agree about anything,
> and weren't very nice about doing so.
Des, you appear to be determined to believe that feuding is worse in
linguistics than elsewhere. It isn't. Perhaps the most notorious
academic feud of our day is the one in biology between the proponents
and the opponents of cladistics. That feud is undeniably vicious.
The two groups appear to hate each other's guts.
Another prominent biological feud is the one between Richard Dawkins
and his associates on the one hand, and the late Stephen Jay Gould and
his associates on the other. Even though, to an outsider like me,
their differences appear to be mainly over points of emphasis and
detail, and not over fundamentals, the disagreement became remarkably
ill-tempered, and some very harsh words were uttered.
From time to time other feuds gain publicity, in the physical and
biological sciences. Once or twice, I have even seen reports (whose
truth I cannot confirm) that members of one camp have tried to prevent
the publication of work by members of the other camp. I've never
heard any reports of such behavior in linguistics.
None of this is new. Isaac Newton was renowned for his feuds with
other scientists, with Hooke and Leibnitz being two of his prominent
opponents. Indeed, Newton hardly seems to have been on cordial terms
with any other scientists at all. And Hooke himself pursued quite a
collection of feuds, especially in his later years.
[on Mithun and Sadock]
> I originally called the style "polemical denunciation", but I didn't
> say or mean to imply that they were denouncing each other
> _personally_, just that they gave the impression they had no time at
> all for each others' _theories_.
So what's new about this? You think it's unusual in academic
disciplines for one person to have no time for another person's views?
> > But, Des -- "far from gracious by the standards one sees in physical
> > sciences"? Where have you bewen living? It is a matter of record
> > that exchanges in the physical (and biological) sciences are sometimes
> > ill-tempered, snotty, and excessively rude. On occasion, scientists
> > get so huffy they stop speaking to each other.
>
> For sure, there's lots of politics and lots of feuding and lots of ill
> will. That's not what I'm talking about though: in most sciences you
> _really can_ refute stuff by demonstrating that its wrong, so there
> isn't the same tendency to have protracted "is! isn't!" style
> arguments. Linguistics often has these, maths very rarely does.
Math is a special case, though math is not without its feuds. My
favorite mathematical feud is Wallis versus Hobbes, though I can't
really count that one, since Wallis knew what he was talking about,
while Hobbes was an imbecile -- a kind of mathematical Ruhlen.
Otherwise, though, you are in error in perceiving a large difference
between linguistics and "most sciences". Certainly the biologists
can't agree on whether cladistics can be shown to be wrong, and the
same is true of the aspects of evoutionary theory on which Dawkins and
Gould disagreed. In fact, there is probably *no* scientific feud in
which the dispute can be settled by demonstration. If a demonstration
were possible, then the feud would surely end.
As for Chomsky, it is a matter of record that certain of his claims
*have* been demonstrated to be wrong. It's just that he and his
followers take no notice.
> > A misconception. At the moment, the feuds in linguistics are few and
> > localized, and they do not compare in number or magnitude with the
> > feuds raging in some other fields.
>
> Is there a non-trivial consensus among phonologists? Do functionalist
> syntacticians talk to either flavour of ex-Chomskyan? (If you want to
> claim that neither phonology or syntax are really all that important
> parts of linguistics we do have irreconcilable differences.)
You are trying to identify the absence of a consensus with a feud.
Nonsense.
> I can well believe that most of the kinds of linguistics that go on
> are sensible, scrupulous and scholarly, especially historical
> linguistics which has developed relatively untraumatically out of the
> work of the neogrammarians, by which I certainly don't mean that the
> techniques haven't evolved. (I say this based on a French book by J-E
> Boltanski which didn't emphasise that point.)
Historical linguistics is my own field, and it is going through a
golden age. In the last several decades, the study of language change
has been revolutionized, largely thanks to the contributions of the
sociolinguists. Since 1960, we have learned more about the ways in
which languages change than our predecessors learned in two centuries.
> But the rival Universalist emphasis in linguistics which can be traced
> back at least to von Humboldt is the one that interests me more. I
> want linguistics to be a science of language that takes its place
> within the sciences of man and aspires to explain the whole
> languageiness of language,
Fair enough. My own tastes run more toward the particular than toward
the universal, but I can easily admire universalist aspirations.
> and that's probably why Chomsky looms
> larger in my world view than yours - it's _my_ tradition he's
> hijacked, and (I happen to think) he's rubbish at it.
For once, I can agree with you.
> That means my
> vision of what linguistics is about and what it should be doing (which
> I claim to have largely inherited from Jakobson) makes it infeasible
> to just go off and play quietly with some nice etymologies.
You make it sound as though etymology is intrinsically less worth
pursuing than other linguistic tasks. Wrong.
Universalist aspirations cannot be usefully pursued in a vacuum. Any
universalist program has to be based squarely on a vast and detailed
empirically-derived understanding of how speakers and languages
behave. This, above all, is where Chomsky falls catastrophically
short: he engages in navel-gazing, and he doesn't look at data.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
grapheus
> Once or twice, I have even seen reports (whose
> truth I cannot confirm) that members of one camp have tried to prevent
> the publication of work by members of the other camp. I've never
> heard any reports of such behavior in linguistics.
>
You are not pretty well informed !.. Personally, I know about several
cases of this !...
grapheus
Brian M. Scott
wrote:
[...]
>Another prominent biological feud is the one between Richard Dawkins
>and his associates on the one hand, and the late Stephen Jay Gould and
>his associates on the other. Even though, to an outsider like me,
>their differences appear to be mainly over points of emphasis and
>detail, and not over fundamentals, the disagreement became remarkably
>ill-tempered, and some very harsh words were uttered.
Though (some of) the associates are guiltier than the principals.
Actually, my impression is that there *is* a fundamental
difference between adaptationists, who see only one significant
mechanism, and pluralists, who see evolution as being far too
complex for any one type of story and who insist that the
reductionists dismiss as inconsequential at least three important
phenomena (random genetic drift, contingency, emergent phenomena
at higher levels).
[...]
>None of this is new. Isaac Newton was renowned for his feuds with
>other scientists, with Hooke and Leibnitz being two of his prominent
>opponents. Indeed, Newton hardly seems to have been on cordial terms
>with any other scientists at all. And Hooke himself pursued quite a
>collection of feuds, especially in his later years.
[...]
>> For sure, there's lots of politics and lots of feuding and lots of ill
>> will. That's not what I'm talking about though: in most sciences you
>> _really can_ refute stuff by demonstrating that its wrong, so there
>> isn't the same tendency to have protracted "is! isn't!" style
>> arguments. Linguistics often has these, maths very rarely does.
>Math is a special case, though math is not without its feuds. My
>favorite mathematical feud is Wallis versus Hobbes, though I can't
>really count that one, since Wallis knew what he was talking about,
>while Hobbes was an imbecile -- a kind of mathematical Ruhlen.
Without taking sides in the main argument, I point out that
Newton and Wallis belong to a very different era and are thus
irrelevant to the practice and conduct of modern science.
[...]
Brian
Peter T. Daniels
If you had the opportunity to impede a publication by Ruhlen, would you
not avail yourself of it?
Anyway, isn't that the entire function of the referee process?
I sent a squib to IJAL demonstrating that Sapir's so-called publication
in *Science* in 1925 announcing, inter alia, "Sino-Dené" couldn't have
been by him, but was put together by an anonymous editor; the referees
seem to have included J. David Sapir and perhaps Regna Darnell, who had
long included that work in the official list of his publications, and it
was rejected. (Alan Kaye almost immediately incorporated my finding into
a BLS [I think] talk and publication, with only a very vague credit to
me.)
Peter T. Daniels
>
> On 4 Oct 2003 07:29:12 -0700, lar...@sussex.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
> wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> >Another prominent biological feud is the one between Richard Dawkins
> >and his associates on the one hand, and the late Stephen Jay Gould and
> >his associates on the other. Even though, to an outsider like me,
> >their differences appear to be mainly over points of emphasis and
> >detail, and not over fundamentals, the disagreement became remarkably
> >ill-tempered, and some very harsh words were uttered.
>
> Though (some of) the associates are guiltier than the principals.
> Actually, my impression is that there *is* a fundamental
> difference between adaptationists, who see only one significant
> mechanism, and pluralists, who see evolution as being far too
> complex for any one type of story and who insist that the
> reductionists dismiss as inconsequential at least three important
> phenomena (random genetic drift, contingency, emergent phenomena
> at higher levels).
Gould's long-time collaborator Niles Eldridge wrote a very nice book
(the one that untangles the reception history of Wegener) insisting that
all the latter are essential to understanding evolution.
Keith GOERINGER
I have to say, I think this is the most interesting thread this ng has
had in a long while. And for me, one of the most refreshing and, dare I
say, vindicating...though perhaps it should be renamed.
In article <48c7f19.03100...@posting.google.com>,
lar...@sussex.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote:
> Des, it is a *bad* mistake to assume that Chomskyan vaporizing is
> typical of linguistics generally.
Amen. I have memories of conferences I attended while early on in grad
school. I would listen to papers, given in English, and come out
utterly at sea. The speakers might as well have been speaking Klingon,
it was so impenetrable.
I decided it would behoove me to take a class in formal syntax. (This
was at Berkeley, not exactly a bastion of Chomskyan formalism.) I did
like some aspects of the theoretical underpinnings, and the professor
was wonderful at pointing out similarities and differences between
various syntactic schools, but despite claims of "UG" applicability, I
could see little way of linking Chomsky's approaches to the languages I
work in (mainly Slavic). Two incidents come to mind as making me think
that the Chomsky-ites suffered from some sort of "The Emporer's New
Clothes" syndrome.
The first was learning about the "Duke of York" principle in the formal
syntax class (invoking a rule of some sort, only to un-invoke it later
on, so the data come out as they should). This struck me as smoke and
mirrors, and rather defeating the purpose of scientific analysis...but
maybe I don't grasp the finer points of the principle.
The second was a paper presented at a conference where the speaker spent
20-30 minutes using elaborate formalism to explain why one cannot have
two non-conjoined ACC-marked NPs in a language -- or something along
those lines (I just tried to find the title on google to make sure I'm
not misrepresenting it, but couldn't...the speaker apparently didn't
feel it an important enough paper to include in the departmental
website's faculty pages!). My thought (and I was, at the time, a fairly
green, timid grad student) was, "Well, duh!" I was relieved when a
senior linguist raised his hand, and very politely and gently remarked
that the speaker had done an admirable job of pointing out something
that any first-year student of an inflected language grasps almost
intuitively. The speaker hemmed, hawed, and made some remark as to why
it was a reasonable approach.
<rant on>
There is no doubt in my mind that those who are "non-believers" or not
adherents of formal (in the Chomskyan sense) linguistics are
discriminated against. It reminds me of the way fundamentalist
Christians view everyone else -- with a condescending pity, that makes
you just want to reach out and slap the snot out of them. My biggest
gripe with formalism is its impenetrability. If you are not an acolyte,
you cannot participate. I don't believe that every branch of knowledge
should be dumbed or watered down to the point of making it accessible to
everyone, but nor do I believe that any real purpose is served by making
things utterly opaque -- be it by design or simply happenstance.
Linguistics is a science, and a certain amount of jargon, terminology,
and, yes, formalism is to be expected. But to my mind the goal should
still be to make it as inclusionary as possible. I try to write in a
way that would be understood by a new grad student and to an old hand,
and this is how many of my mentors in grad school wrote.
<rant off>
Regards,
Keith
Douglas G. Kilday
No, I didn't miss that part, and claiming that no Etruscan inscription uses
gamma is still wrong.
DGK
grapheus
> Larry Trask wrote:
> Once or twice, I have even seen reports (whose
> > truth I cannot confirm) that members of one camp have tried to prevent
> > the publication of work by members of the other camp. I've never
> > heard any reports of such behavior in linguistics.
>
> If you had the opportunity to impede a publication by Ruhlen, would you
> not avail yourself of it?
>
> Anyway, isn't that the entire function of the referee process?
>
Yes, it is !.. Protecting the DOGMA !...
Anyone who tried to emit a new idea going against it knows that !..
grapheus
Larry Trask
[on attempts at preventing publication]
> If you had the opportunity to impede a publication by Ruhlen, would you
> not avail yourself of it?
>
> Anyway, isn't that the entire function of the referee process?
If I were asked to referee a proposed publication written by Ruhen, I
would of course provide an honest evaluation, and it is a
near-certainly that my evaluation would be wholly negative, and that I
would advise against publication.
But two points.
First, Ruhlen is not recognized by anybody in linguistics as a member
of the profession. Every single linguist who is acquainted with his
work regards him as a crackpot and a charlatan. My recommendation
therefore cannot be interpreted as an effort by a member of one camp
to suppress the publication of work by a member of another camp.
Second, the cases I have read about in the hard sciences were --
according to the reports which I saw -- not of this kind. They were
not merely negative referees' reports. They were attempts at using
personal influence with editors to suppress the publication of work
which was regarded as valuable by members of the profession on the
other side of the divide.
I'm sorry I can't cite chapter and verse here, but I didn't know when
I was reading these reports that I would want to describe them later.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Larry Trask
> Without taking sides in the main argument, I point out that
> Newton and Wallis belong to a very different era and are thus
> irrelevant to the practice and conduct of modern science.
Well, it would be nice to think so, anyway.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Larry Trask
> I do have to add, though, that -- while I went yessing through both Des's
> and Larry's postings, and agree with most of what they say -- I suspect
> the situation in the US is rather more the way Des describes it than
> Larry,
Yes; I keep hearing reports that things are worse in the States than
they are on our side of the water. But I would find it hard to
believe that the Chomskyans are close to a majority even over there.
I can name lots of prominent US linguists whose work owes nothing to
Chomsky. And there exist entire large areas of the discipline into
which Chomsky's influence has not significantly extended, such as
sociolinguistics, discourse, philology, and lexical semantics (and a
lot of other semantics), not to mention most areas of my own subject,
historical linguistics.
> and the only time I've talked with UK linguists recently (last year
> at UCL) it looked and sounded to me like my colleagues considered The
> Established Religion to be pretty firmly on top. Certainly it is in the
> States.
I'd be interested to know just who you talked to. Apart from poor
beleaguered Dick Hudson, UCL is the most wild-eyed Chomskyan
department in Britain. But it's not typical. A more typical
department is Manchester, where they appear to teach Chomskyan theory
out of a sense of duty, but where few members of the department could
be described as Chomskyans.
> We *are* discriminated against -- Larry's right -- but it's our own damn
> fault to a greater extent than we like to admit, for treating damn fool
> ideas with so much reverence. In Walt Kelly's immortal phrase, "We have
> met the enemy, and he is us."
I couldn't agree more.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Brian M. Scott
wrote:
>b.s...@csuohio.edu (Brian M. Scott) wrote in message news:<3f7efe3c....@enews.newsguy.com>...
Oh, they definitely are: the institution and practice of science
has changed enormously since their day -- mathematics probably
rather less -- and in some ways Newton was a holdover from an
earlier age besides. This isn't to say that modern science can't
accommodate similar controversies and animosities, of course.
Brian
David Bowie
: On 03 Oct 2003 "Peter T. Daniels" wrote...
: > Des Small wrote:
: >> That's interesting - our Borders (hoorah!) here has
: >> linguistics in an annexe to western philosophy, which
: >> contains nothing more egregious than Hegel...
<snip>
: > Barnes & Noble still puts linguistics next to philosophy,
: > but over the winter Borders moved it alongside archeology
: > and anthropology.
: One of mine has it next to the Judaica, if I remember
: correctly; the other I think has it next to religion.
On my more cynical days, i'd see this as the best of all possible places
to put it.
<snip>
David, who's a sociolinguist, so what would he know?
--
David Bowie http://pmpkn.net/lx
Jeanne's Two Laws of Chocolate: If there is no chocolate in the
house, there is too little; some must be purchased. If there is
chocolate in the house, there is too much; it must be consumed.
Des Small
> Des Small <des....@bristol.ac.uk> wrote in message news:<yyrjoewy...@pc156.maths.bris.ac.uk>...
>
> [LT]
>
> > > Des, it is a *bad* mistake to assume that Chomskyan vaporizing is
> > > typical of linguistics generally.
> >
> > It would be. Another review in _Linguist_ was of a "survey" of the
> > state of the art in phonology, in that each of the major currents got
> > a chapter to explain why there school was right and all the others
> > were wrong. The reviewer said (this is all from unreliable memory,
> > sadly) that you wouldn't give it to a neophyte because they'd be
> > forced to conclude that phonologists couldn't agree about anything,
> > and weren't very nice about doing so.
>
> Des, you appear to be determined to believe that feuding is worse in
> linguistics than elsewhere. It isn't.
Happily that isn't really quite what I believe.
[snip lots of good stuff about proper scientists being horrid too.]
> In fact, there is probably *no* scientific feud in which the dispute
> can be settled by demonstration. If a demonstration were possible,
> then the feud would surely end.
Zackly! My claim is essentially that the physical and biological
sciences are largely preoccupied with questions that can be and are
settled, and the feuds are therefore anomalous. With the more
theoretical side of linguistics, the questions are much less likely to
be such as to allow a consensus on how they can be settled, and in
each of phonology and (especially) syntax the number of irreconcilable
schools is rather closer to the number of participants than is the
case in other sciences. My model for the behaviour of these linguists
is not the (admittedly nasty) feuds of biologists so much as the
behaviour that has been standard among philosophers since pretty much
the dawn of time: a philosopher typically thinks any other philosopher
can be accurately described as "completely wrong", at some appropriate
level of detail.
Chomsky's "Cartesianism" is merely a cartoon Hegelian antithesis of
behaviourism - instead of the behaviourist hypothesis that the only
scientifically legitimate account of the contents of persons' heads
involves lumps of grey porridgy goo obeying the laws of physics,
Chomsky insists that the mental phenomena inside his head constitute
both the only legitimate data and the only legitimate validation
procedure for linguistics, and (I have seen him quoted to this effect,
albeit by enemies) that the communicative possibilities of language
are merely epiphenomena of its real purpose in introspection. (My
desire to say, "Behold the ineluctable unfolding of the dialectic!"
only just loses out to my desire to exclaim, "Good grief!")
> As for Chomsky, it is a matter of record that certain of his claims
> *have* been demonstrated to be wrong. It's just that he and his
> followers take no notice.
As an example of how I don't just wibble, I'll point out that the one
of the things that annoys me most about Chomsky's work is his
influence on phonology. The preceding generation of phonology was
interested in information theory, cybernetics, speech recognition and
all sorts of good stuff. But all that stuff got thrown out with the
admitted bath-water of behaviourism, and then SPE added insult to
injury in introducing the morphophoneme: allegedly a fundamental truth
about the human mind (except in so far as that would imply having
something to say about how it works - the classic Chomsky bait and
switch) but upstream (which stream and whether or not equipped with a
paddle are open questions, of course) of anything as vulgar as
acoustics.
(The above is in fact just more wibbling, as you may have noticed.
The _real_ non-wibbling involves writing code in the service of a Top
Secret Project in computational phonology.)
_I_ want a theory of phonology that gives an account of how linguistic
signifiers are constructed out of acoustic phenomena (this is almost
as eccentric as my enthusiasm for French philosophy, of course, but
probably easier to defend) and I don't see how ignoring Chomsky
(however rewarding that may be) is going to undo the 40-odd years that
he has IMHO caused to be wasted in the pursuit of this.
[...]
> > Is there a non-trivial consensus among phonologists? Do functionalist
> > syntacticians talk to either flavour of ex-Chomskyan? (If you want to
> > claim that neither phonology or syntax are really all that important
> > parts of linguistics we do have irreconcilable differences.)
>
> You are trying to identify the absence of a consensus with a feud.
> Nonsense.
I'm trying to identify the absence of a _basis on which a consensus
could be achieved_ (in these fields) with a lack of a theory of
science which can encompass linguistics. I don't have much time for
positivist philosophies in the human sciences in the first place, but
the fact that positivism begat behaviourist dogmaticism and in doing
so gave Chomsky his big break.
It isn't a falsifiable hypothesis that some appreciation of Husserl's
critique of empiricism would have innoculated linguistics against the
methodological aberrations of both these forms of lunacy, but I
certainly wish it had been tried.
> > I can well believe that most of the kinds of linguistics that go on
> > are sensible, scrupulous and scholarly, especially historical
> > linguistics which has developed relatively untraumatically out of the
> > work of the neogrammarians, by which I certainly don't mean that the
> > techniques haven't evolved. (I say this based on a French book by J-E
> > Boltanski which didn't emphasise that point.)
>
> Historical linguistics is my own field, and it is going through a
> golden age. In the last several decades, the study of language change
> has been revolutionized, largely thanks to the contributions of the
> sociolinguists. Since 1960, we have learned more about the ways in
> which languages change than our predecessors learned in two centuries.
Well, I am of course looking forward to your popular book on the
subject...
> > But the rival Universalist emphasis in linguistics which can be traced
> > back at least to von Humboldt is the one that interests me more. I
> > want linguistics to be a science of language that takes its place
> > within the sciences of man and aspires to explain the whole
> > languageiness of language,
>
> Fair enough. My own tastes run more toward the particular than toward
> the universal, but I can easily admire universalist aspirations.
>
> > and that's probably why Chomsky looms larger in my world view than
> > yours - it's _my_ tradition he's hijacked, and (I happen to think)
> > he's rubbish at it.
>
> For once, I can agree with you.
>
> > That means my vision of what linguistics is about and what it
> > should be doing (which I claim to have largely inherited from
> > Jakobson) makes it infeasible to just go off and play quietly with
> > some nice etymologies.
>
> You make it sound as though etymology is intrinsically less worth
> pursuing than other linguistic tasks. Wrong.
Well, I don't really think that, of course. Data is good!
> Universalist aspirations cannot be usefully pursued in a vacuum. Any
> universalist program has to be based squarely on a vast and detailed
> empirically-derived understanding of how speakers and languages
> behave. This, above all, is where Chomsky falls catastrophically
> short: he engages in navel-gazing, and he doesn't look at data.
I'm entirely in favour of data. What I'm not in favour of is
abandoning everything that cannot be accommodated within the narrow
confines of a Popperian conception of science, because in linguistics
that amounts not so much to a sensible pruning of ambition as to an
amputation of the point.
Des
doesn't mind being condemned, only misunderstood.
Greg Lee
...
> admitted bath-water of behaviourism, and then SPE added insult to
> injury in introducing the morphophoneme: allegedly a fundamental truth
I think you need to explain that. SPE introduced a (rather strange)
sort of markedness representation -- is that your "morphophoneme"?
It never caught on, and anyhow, I see no similarity there to
morphophonemes. Maybe you mean what Chomsky earlier called "systematic
phonemes"?
> about the human mind (except in so far as that would imply having
> something to say about how it works - the classic Chomsky bait and
> switch) but upstream (which stream and whether or not equipped with a
> paddle are open questions, of course) of anything as vulgar as
> acoustics.
You construe generative phonology as saying the opposite of what it
actually says. Underlying and surface phonological forms are made ot
the same stuff -- phonetic features. There are no morphophonemes.
,,,
--
Greg Lee <gr...@ling.lll.hawaii.edu>
Lester Zick
Is anyone seriously suggesting that equal and opposite reactions do
not still occur? Or that universal gravitation is not still an inverse
square force?
Regards - Lester
Lester Zick
in sci.lang wrote:
>lar...@sussex.ac.uk (Larry Trask) writes:
>
>> Des Small <des....@bristol.ac.uk> wrote in message news:<yyrjoewy...@pc156.maths.bris.ac.uk>...
>>
>> [LT]
>>
>> > > Des, it is a *bad* mistake to assume that Chomskyan vaporizing is
>> > > typical of linguistics generally.
>> >
>> > It would be. Another review in _Linguist_ was of a "survey" of the
>> > state of the art in phonology, in that each of the major currents got
>> > a chapter to explain why there school was right and all the others
>> > were wrong. The reviewer said (this is all from unreliable memory,
>> > sadly) that you wouldn't give it to a neophyte because they'd be
>> > forced to conclude that phonologists couldn't agree about anything,
>> > and weren't very nice about doing so.
>>
>> Des, you appear to be determined to believe that feuding is worse in
>> linguistics than elsewhere. It isn't.
>
>Happily that isn't really quite what I believe.
>
>[snip lots of good stuff about proper scientists being horrid too.]
>
>> In fact, there is probably *no* scientific feud in which the dispute
>> can be settled by demonstration. If a demonstration were possible,
>> then the feud would surely end.
>
>Zackly! My claim is essentially that the physical and biological
>sciences are largely preoccupied with questions that can be and are
>settled, and the feuds are therefore anomalous. . . .
Hardly. This is characteristic of every intellectual frontier and
feuding is just as prevalent on scientific frontiers as any other.
What tends to be true is that scientific frontiers are more widely
identified and understood.
> . . . With the more
>theoretical side of linguistics, the questions are much less likely to
>be such as to allow a consensus on how they can be settled, and in
>each of phonology and (especially) syntax the number of irreconcilable
>schools is rather closer to the number of participants than is the
>case in other sciences. My model for the behaviour of these linguists
>is not the (admittedly nasty) feuds of biologists so much as the
>behaviour that has been standard among philosophers since pretty much
>the dawn of time: a philosopher typically thinks any other philosopher
>can be accurately described as "completely wrong", at some appropriate
>level of detail.
Have you ever known a philosopher to say anything that was literally
correct apart from historical observations and Aristotle's syllogistic
inference? Not plausibly nor probably correct but demonstrably so?
>
>Chomsky's "Cartesianism" is merely a cartoon Hegelian antithesis of
>behaviourism - instead of the behaviourist hypothesis that the only
>scientifically legitimate account of the contents of persons' heads
>involves lumps of grey porridgy goo obeying the laws of physics,
>Chomsky insists that the mental phenomena inside his head constitute
>both the only legitimate data and the only legitimate validation
>procedure for linguistics, and (I have seen him quoted to this effect,
>albeit by enemies) that the communicative possibilities of language
>are merely epiphenomena of its real purpose in introspection. (My
>desire to say, "Behold the ineluctable unfolding of the dialectic!"
>only just loses out to my desire to exclaim, "Good grief!")
Sounds rather like if one scratches a linguist one finds a dialectical
materialist of one sort or another.
Regards - Lester
Alan Hogue
Uh, take another look at this line:
"the institution and practice of science has changed enormously since their day"
Seems pretty clear no one's claiming that.
Alan H.
Peter T. Daniels
> As an example of how I don't just wibble, I'll point out that the one
> of the things that annoys me most about Chomsky's work is his
> influence on phonology. The preceding generation of phonology was
> interested in information theory, cybernetics, speech recognition and
> all sorts of good stuff. But all that stuff got thrown out with the
> admitted bath-water of behaviourism, and then SPE added insult to
> injury in introducing the morphophoneme: allegedly a fundamental truth
> about the human mind (except in so far as that would imply having
> something to say about how it works - the classic Chomsky bait and
> switch) but upstream (which stream and whether or not equipped with a
> paddle are open questions, of course) of anything as vulgar as
> acoustics.
>
> (The above is in fact just more wibbling, as you may have noticed.
> The _real_ non-wibbling involves writing code in the service of a Top
> Secret Project in computational phonology.)
>
> _I_ want a theory of phonology that gives an account of how linguistic
> signifiers are constructed out of acoustic phenomena (this is almost
> as eccentric as my enthusiasm for French philosophy, of course, but
> probably easier to defend) and I don't see how ignoring Chomsky
> (however rewarding that may be) is going to undo the 40-odd years that
> he has IMHO caused to be wasted in the pursuit of this.
Isn't that Jakobson, Fant, & Halle 1951?
And then Jakobson & Halle 1956 made the acoustic features into
articulatory features.
And then Halle 1959 (SPR) supposedly showed that "phoneme" wasn't a
useful concept.
And then Chomsky & Halle 1968 (but circulating long before that) (SPE)
extended it to an analysis of English orthography.
Where I think phonology went wrong was with the "autosegmentalism" of
McCarthy & Prince (I'll always use scare quotes because the "auto-" is
meant to represent "autonomous," not "auto-" 'self') which claims to use
just features and syllables in analysis, but insists on throwing in a
level for "segments," a notion that's merely an artifact of alphabetic
writing and has little to do with the way people produce or hear speech.
Ross Clark
>
>
> Where I think phonology went wrong was with the "autosegmentalism" of
> McCarthy & Prince (I'll always use scare quotes because the "auto-" is
> meant to represent "autonomous," not "auto-" 'self') which claims to use
> just features and syllables in analysis, but insists on throwing in a
> level for "segments," a notion that's merely an artifact of alphabetic
> writing and has little to do with the way people produce or hear speech.
> --
> Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net
So where did alphabetic writing come from?
Ross Clark
Peter T. Daniels
>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> >
> >
> > Where I think phonology went wrong was with the "autosegmentalism" of
> > McCarthy & Prince (I'll always use scare quotes because the "auto-" is
> > meant to represent "autonomous," not "auto-" 'self') which claims to use
> > just features and syllables in analysis, but insists on throwing in a
> > level for "segments," a notion that's merely an artifact of alphabetic
> > writing and has little to do with the way people produce or hear speech.
> So where did alphabetic writing come from?
Accident, my man, pure accident.
The Egyptian proto-scribe misunderstood how Sumerian writing worked, the
Semitic proto-scribe misunderstood how Egyptian writing worked, and the
Greek proto-scribe misunderstood how Phoenician writing worked.
(When people are very good at learning the
predecessor-script/orthography, you end up with monstrosities like
Pahlavi and Manchu.)
Lester Zick
I'm not so sure from the first message's " . . . irrelevant to the
practice and conduct of modern science." apparently referring to
Newtonian mechanics. In fact from your citation it really isn't clear
what is being claimed exactly insofar as the practice of science is
concerned.
Admittedly the institution of science has changed. No one would
suggest otherwise. But somehow I rather doubt this is what the authors
actually had in mind. I suspect its the conceptual foundation for the
mechanics. Especially since the responder take the trouble to point
out that most of the math remains relevant, I infer that the plausible
alternative to the math is the mechanics. That's why I asked.
Regards - Lester
Alan Hogue
Well, I'll let others clarify their own posts, but it seems to me that
the institution is precisely what is relevant here, and not the
conceptual foundation of mechanics. As I understand it, this whole
thread is looking at the practice of scientific inquiry as a social
activity. As such, changes in the institutions that foster this activity
would be more relevant than the tenability of Newton's theories today,
would they not?
But perhaps I'm misinterpreting it all.
Alan H.
Ross Clark
But are not the misunderstandings themselves a clue that a different
type of unit was available to be encoded, whether or not that's what the
users of the source script intended? If segments are really no part of
our representation of language, it is hard to understand how alphabetic
scripts have worked so well for so long.
Ross Clark
Brian M. Scott
(Lester Zick) wrote:
>On Mon, 06 Oct 2003 10:23:09 -0700, Alan Hogue
><aho...@lawdot.berkeleydot.edu> in sci.lang wrote:
>>Lester Zick wrote:
>>>On Sun, 05 Oct 2003 18:14:33 GMT, b.s...@csuohio.edu (Brian M. Scott)
>>>in sci.lang wrote:
>>>>On 5 Oct 2003 07:54:51 -0700, lar...@sussex.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
>>>>wrote:
>>>>>b.s...@csuohio.edu (Brian M. Scott) wrote in message news:<3f7efe3c....@enews.newsguy.com>...
>>>>>>Without taking sides in the main argument, I point out that
>>>>>>Newton and Wallis belong to a very different era and are thus
>>>>>>irrelevant to the practice and conduct of modern science.
>>>>>Well, it would be nice to think so, anyway.
>>>>Oh, they definitely are: the institution and practice of science
>>>>has changed enormously since their day -- mathematics probably
>>>>rather less -- and in some ways Newton was a holdover from an
>>>>earlier age besides. This isn't to say that modern science can't
>>>>accommodate similar controversies and animosities, of course.
>>>Is anyone seriously suggesting that equal and opposite reactions do
>>>not still occur? Or that universal gravitation is not still an inverse
>>>square force?
>>Uh, take another look at this line:
>>"the institution and practice of science has changed enormously since their day"
>>Seems pretty clear no one's claiming that.
>I'm not so sure from the first message's " . . . irrelevant to the
>practice and conduct of modern science." apparently referring to
>Newtonian mechanics.
Alan is correct. I meant exactly what I wrote. Can you not
read?
[...]
Peter T. Daniels
There are articulatory targets (though only the stops are fully
specifiable/identifiable), but no more -- but note this:
"In ancient Mesopotamia ... [m]ost of the signlists are organized
semantically, but there is also a phonetic tradition, which groups signs
according to initial consonant and according to final consonant: tu ta
ti, ur ar ir; but the CV series and the VC series are not
associated./20/ While beginning and ending portions of syllables have
been recognized as similar, syllables have not, in effect, been
segmented into phonemes.
"20. The first eight lines of the text read tu / ta / ti / tu-ta-ti / nu
/na / ni / nu-na-ni; this pattern continues for 102 preserved lines. The
CV syllables appear in the order t n b z s h d r w k l ' m S g G p; they
are followed by the VC list, in the order r tVm S pVr b l z g m
(Kizilyay 1959). Significantly, a copy of this text recovered from
Ugarit, where an augmented abjad was in use, places the Vg and gV and VS
and SV signs together (Nougayrol 1965)."
(my "The Syllabic Origin of Writing and the Segmental Origin of the
Alphabet," in Downing, Lima, & Noonan, eds., *The Linguistics of
Literacy* (Benjamins, 1992), 92, 103)
Greg Lee
...
> Where I think phonology went wrong was with the "autosegmentalism" of
> McCarthy & Prince (I'll always use scare quotes because the "auto-" is
> meant to represent "autonomous," not "auto-" 'self') which claims to use
> just features and syllables in analysis, but insists on throwing in a
> level for "segments," a notion that's merely an artifact of alphabetic
> writing and has little to do with the way people produce or hear speech.
Yes, I agree, except segments were part of generative phonology before McCarthy
& Prince. Down with segments.
--
Greg Lee <gr...@ling.lll.hawaii.edu>
Greg Lee
...
> But are not the misunderstandings themselves a clue that a different
> type of unit was available to be encoded, whether or not that's what the
> users of the source script intended? If segments are really no part of
> our representation of language, it is hard to understand how alphabetic
> scripts have worked so well for so long.
Not so hard. The number of combinations of prosodies that can be in
effect simultaneously is strictly limited (that's the phonemic
principle), and that's what makes alphabets feasible.
--
Greg Lee <gr...@ling.lll.hawaii.edu>
Lester Zick
<aho...@lawdot.berkeleydot.edu> in sci.lang wrote:
Sure. But the same could be said of Planck, Einstein, et al. Science
institutions change with every generation. I can understand that the
immediate controversy might be interpreted this way if the only
purpose were to highlight the nature of scientific controversy in
general. But in that case why call Newton irrelevant? His scientific
conflicts would have been as relevant - and perhaps more so - than
most others. If this were the intended meaning I don't see point.
In any event thanks for the perspective.
>
Regards - Lester
Lester Zick
in sci.lang wrote:
Probably as well as you can write.
Regards - Lester
Brian M. Scott
(Lester Zick) wrote:
>>>>Lester Zick wrote:
Demonstrably not.
Ross Clark
Interesting. I'll try to get hold of your paper. But doesn't the
Mesopotamian evidence suggest that *something* between syllable and
feature was being recognized? Is that something an "articulatory
target"?
Ross Clark
Ross Clark
Rather than you having to write me a lecture on the subject, can you
suggest somewhere I could find an explanation of what "combinations of
prosodies...in effect simultaneously" means? Is this your own theory, or
is it standard stuff in phonology now? Anyhow, it's good to see the
phonemic principle still walking around, however hard to recognize.
Ross Clark
Greg Lee
> Greg Lee wrote:
> >
> > Ross Clark <benl...@ihug.co.nz> wrote:
> > ...
> > > But are not the misunderstandings themselves a clue that a different
> > > type of unit was available to be encoded, whether or not that's what the
> > > users of the source script intended? If segments are really no part of
> > > our representation of language, it is hard to understand how alphabetic
> > > scripts have worked so well for so long.
> >
> > Not so hard. The number of combinations of prosodies that can be in
> > effect simultaneously is strictly limited (that's the phonemic
> > principle), and that's what makes alphabets feasible.
> >
> > --
> > Greg Lee <gr...@ling.lll.hawaii.edu>
> Rather than you having to write me a lecture on the subject, can you
> suggest somewhere I could find an explanation of what "combinations of
> prosodies...in effect simultaneously" means? Is this your own theory, or
Sorry, I can't, except to say that "prosody" is borrowed from Firthian
analysis, and means the same (as I use it) as Zelig Harris's "long
component". Donegan & Stampe have a forthcoming paper "Asegmental
Phonology", which, however, has been forthcoming for many years. (Their
version of the theory covers only processes, not rules, so it is
less interesting than mine.)
By "prosodies" I just mean phonological features that do not respect
segment boundaries, but since there are no segments, all phonological
features are like that.
> is it standard stuff in phonology now? Anyhow, it's good to see the
> phonemic principle still walking around, however hard to recognize.
It's not standard. The parts of it I've worked out are mine.
--
Greg Lee <gr...@ling.lll.hawaii.edu>
Peter T. Daniels
Some sort of similarity between C\1 V and V C\1. Acoustic?
articulatory? analytic?
Peter T. Daniels
Segments were even part of phonology _before_ generative phonology. They
had the opportunity to throw them away, but they didn't have the insight
(or the courage?) to do so.
(Like Greenberg recently claimed that he had recognized Omotic as
probably distinct from Cushitic, but was afraid to say so in print.)
Larry Trask
> Where I think phonology went wrong was with the "autosegmentalism" of
> McCarthy & Prince (I'll always use scare quotes because the "auto-" is
> meant to represent "autonomous," not "auto-" 'self') which claims to use
> just features and syllables in analysis, but insists on throwing in a
> level for "segments," a notion that's merely an artifact of alphabetic
> writing and has little to do with the way people produce or hear speech.
Peter, this going too far. There exists a great deal of evidence for
the psychological reality of segments.
For one thing, there is the evidence from speech errors, particular
those slips of the tongue of the type called "spoonerisms". These
involve the interchange of segments, as in "The Lord is a shoving
leopard" (possibly apocryphal, but typical) and "bred and bekfast"
(real). Such slips are very frequent, and they have been understood
for decades as constituting direct evidence for the reality of
segments.
It is noteworthy that such slips almost invariably preserve the
phonotactics of the language. So, "slips of the tongue" might come
out as "tips of the slongue", but never as "tlips of the songue",
because English phonotactics does not allow word-initial /tl-/. This
is further evidence for the reality of segments.
For another thing, we have the evidence from the historical changes we
call metatheses, in which segments are reordered. For example,
earlier Spanish
*<crocodilo> and *<miraglo> have yielded modern <cocodrilo>
'crocodile' and
<milagro> 'miracle' -- and there are lots more of these in Spanish.
English has the long-term fluctuation between 'wasp' and 'wops', and
between 'ask' and 'ax'. And for 'comfortable' my mother tongue has
'cumfterble', with metathesis of /r/ and /t/.
Metathesis of distinctive features is possible and attested, but the
overwhelming majority of metatheses apply to segments -- confirming
the reality of these things.
It cannot be doubted that segments are psychologically real. They may
not be
*physically* real, given the constraints on the movements of the vocal
organs, but that is another matter.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Des Small
> Des Small <des....@bristol.ac.uk> wrote:
> ...
> > admitted bath-water of behaviourism, and then SPE added insult to
> > injury in introducing the morphophoneme: allegedly a fundamental truth
> ...
>
> I think you need to explain that. SPE introduced a (rather strange)
> sort of markedness representation -- is that your "morphophoneme"?
> It never caught on, and anyhow, I see no similarity there to
> morphophonemes. Maybe you mean what Chomsky earlier called "systematic
> phonemes"?
Sorry, I got my terminology in a twist. The lowest level of
underlying phonemes is what I'm objecting too, although there's a
sense in which it isn't really.
> > about the human mind (except in so far as that would imply having
> > something to say about how it works - the classic Chomsky bait and
> > switch) but upstream (which stream and whether or not equipped with a
> > paddle are open questions, of course) of anything as vulgar as
> > acoustics.
>
> You construe generative phonology as saying the opposite of what it
> actually says. Underlying and surface phonological forms are made ot
> the same stuff -- phonetic features. There are no morphophonemes.
In what sense are underlying forms made out of anything?
Underlying forms (which aren't observable) are operated on by
morphophonemic and allophonic rules (ditto) under no particular
constraints - in particular the competence/performance division
means that the theory is not giving an account of what either speakers
or listeners do (which is performance) and the theory is immune to
evidence, whether from psycholinguistics or language acquisition.
"Competence" can very easily become simply a legitimisation for
solipsism as a methodological principle.
When I went back to Duchet's _La Phonologie_ to straighten out my
terminology, I noticed a section on (Stampe's) natural phonology and
(Venneman and Hooper's) natural generative phonology, which look to
have anticipated my objections. Of the latter we are told that "elle
refuse par exemple la neutralisation absolue, c'est à dire le fait de
postuler dans un système phonologique une opposition, qui serait
ensuite neutralisée dans tous les contextes en surface. Elle rejoint
par là certaines exigences de la phonologie structurale classique,
mais dans le cadre de la phonologie générative."
This is certainly much harder for me to object to than generative
accounts of competence. Instead of that distinction, I'd rather go
back to something like Jakobson's code/message, but to be more precise
I'd rather use the distinction "communiqué"/"infrastructure
communicative". The point of this is that _l'infrastructure
communiquative_, as applied to phonology, explicitly includes (perhaps
abstract forms of) the structures and processes that speakers and
listeners use to map between acoustic data and linguistic signifiers,
and is constrained further by the fact that this has to have somehow
been acquired - as I understand the debate following SPE, the question
of how person's ended up with a knowledge of underlying forms that
looks almost isomorphic to the phonology of Chaucer's English was
finessed by the counter-argument that they didn't.
Des
is firmly against competence...
Des Small
> Des Small wrote:
>
> > As an example of how I don't just wibble, I'll point out that the one
> > of the things that annoys me most about Chomsky's work is his
> > influence on phonology. The preceding generation of phonology was
> > interested in information theory, cybernetics, speech recognition and
> > all sorts of good stuff. But all that stuff got thrown out with the
> > admitted bath-water of behaviourism, and then SPE added insult to
> > injury in introducing the morphophoneme: allegedly a fundamental truth
> > about the human mind (except in so far as that would imply having
> > something to say about how it works - the classic Chomsky bait and
> > switch) but upstream (which stream and whether or not equipped with a
> > paddle are open questions, of course) of anything as vulgar as
> > acoustics.
> >
> > (The above is in fact just more wibbling, as you may have noticed.
> > The _real_ non-wibbling involves writing code in the service of a Top
> > Secret Project in computational phonology.)
> >
> > _I_ want a theory of phonology that gives an account of how linguistic
> > signifiers are constructed out of acoustic phenomena (this is almost
> > as eccentric as my enthusiasm for French philosophy, of course, but
> > probably easier to defend) and I don't see how ignoring Chomsky
> > (however rewarding that may be) is going to undo the 40-odd years that
> > he has IMHO caused to be wasted in the pursuit of this.
>
> Isn't that Jakobson, Fant, & Halle 1951?
It's not unrelated...
> And then Jakobson & Halle 1956 made the acoustic features into
> articulatory features.
>
> And then Halle 1959 (SPR) supposedly showed that "phoneme" wasn't a
> useful concept.
>
> And then Chomsky & Halle 1968 (but circulating long before that) (SPE)
> extended it to an analysis of English orthography.
Where did "competence/performance" get introduced to phonology? That
would be my choice for the Great Going Wrong.
Des
thinks listeners are not optional
> Where I think phonology went wrong was with the "autosegmentalism" of
> McCarthy & Prince (I'll always use scare quotes because the "auto-" is
> meant to represent "autonomous," not "auto-" 'self') which claims to use
> just features and syllables in analysis, but insists on throwing in a
> level for "segments," a notion that's merely an artifact of alphabetic
> writing and has little to do with the way people produce or hear speech.
> --
> Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net
--
Greg Lee
> would be my choice for the Great Going Wrong.
Chomsky's _Aspects of the theory of syntax_, I think. But it's not
really *in* phonology, just in some phonologists. I mean to say,
if you examine the details of a generative theory of some specific
language -- the rules, conventions, forms, derivations -- you'll
find no competence/performance distinction there. The distinction
provides a convenient way to explain away some failings of the
theory, but take away the distinction and admit the failings, and
the theory itself is unaffected. The thing to do with performance/
competence is just forget it.
--
Greg Lee <gr...@ling.lll.hawaii.edu>
Henry Polard
lar...@sussex.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote:
> "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
> news:<3F81D0...@worldnet.att.net>...
>
> > Where I think phonology went wrong was with the "autosegmentalism" of
> > McCarthy & Prince (I'll always use scare quotes because the "auto-" is
> > meant to represent "autonomous," not "auto-" 'self') which claims to use
> > just features and syllables in analysis, but insists on throwing in a
> > level for "segments," a notion that's merely an artifact of alphabetic
> > writing and has little to do with the way people produce or hear speech.
>
> Peter, this going too far. There exists a great deal of evidence for
> the psychological reality of segments.
>
> For one thing, there is the evidence from speech errors, particular
> those slips of the tongue of the type called "spoonerisms". These
> involve the interchange of segments, as in "The Lord is a shoving
> leopard" (possibly apocryphal, but typical) and "bred and bekfast"
> (real). Such slips are very frequent, and they have been understood
> for decades as constituting direct evidence for the reality of
> segments.
Also, there are jokes the rely on spoonerisms (i can't think of any
clean ones right now). These jokes are common in French (a
contrepetrie; see http://www.bonnesblagues.com/blague/1104/). I don't know about other languages.
Anday on'tday orgetfay Igpay Atinlay.
Do language games like these in other languages lend support to the
notion of the psychological reality of segments?
What about rhymes and alliteration?
Henry Polard || And I don't stow thrones in grass houses.
Greg Lee
> > Des Small <des....@bristol.ac.uk> wrote:
> > ...
> > > admitted bath-water of behaviourism, and then SPE added insult to
> > > injury in introducing the morphophoneme: allegedly a fundamental truth
> > ...
> >
> > I think you need to explain that. SPE introduced a (rather strange)
> > sort of markedness representation -- is that your "morphophoneme"?
> > It never caught on, and anyhow, I see no similarity there to
> > morphophonemes. Maybe you mean what Chomsky earlier called "systematic
> > phonemes"?
> Sorry, I got my terminology in a twist. The lowest level of
> underlying phonemes is what I'm objecting too, although there's a
> sense in which it isn't really.
> > > about the human mind (except in so far as that would imply having
> > > something to say about how it works - the classic Chomsky bait and
> > > switch) but upstream (which stream and whether or not equipped with a
> > > paddle are open questions, of course) of anything as vulgar as
> > > acoustics.
> >
> > You construe generative phonology as saying the opposite of what it
> > actually says. Underlying and surface phonological forms are made ot
> > the same stuff -- phonetic features. There are no morphophonemes.
> In what sense are underlying forms made out of anything?
In the sense that you examine the underlying forms proposed and
see what's in them. I don't understand this questions.
> Underlying forms (which aren't observable) are operated on by
They are too observable.
> morphophonemic and allophonic rules (ditto) under no particular
> constraints
There are constraints, I would suppose even stronger than those
given in SPE's chapter 8.
> - in particular the competence/performance division
> means that the theory is not giving an account of what either speakers
> or listeners do (which is performance) and the theory is immune to
> evidence, whether from psycholinguistics or language acquisition.
I agree with you, but this is an easy matter to remedy. Get rid
of the division and away goes the immunity.
> "Competence" can very easily become simply a legitimisation for
> solipsism as a methodological principle.
> When I went back to Duchet's _La Phonologie_ to straighten out my
> terminology, I noticed a section on (Stampe's) natural phonology and
> (Venneman and Hooper's) natural generative phonology, which look to
There is essentially nothing in common between those two theories
other than "natural" in the names.
> have anticipated my objections. Of the latter we are told that "elle
> refuse par exemple la neutralisation absolue, c'est ? dire le fait de
> postuler dans un syst?me phonologique une opposition, qui serait
> ensuite neutralis?e dans tous les contextes en surface. Elle rejoint
> par l? certaines exigences de la phonologie structurale classique,
> mais dans le cadre de la phonologie g?n?rative."
My French comprehension not real great, but I don't see what prohibiting
absolute neutralization has to do with it. That's a proposal of
Kiparsky, a generative phonologist, which one might accept or not,
independent of other theoretical affiliations. Does the last sentence
of the quote say that Kiparsky's proposal somehow brings phonology
closer to pre-generative days? I don't see that it does. Arguably
some earlier theories did not allow for neutralization, but
neutralization is still allowed, even accepting Kiparsky's theory --
only *absolute* neutralization is prohibited. Absolute neutralization
is the case where the abstractness of an underlying morpheme cannot be
supported by reference to any alternation in that morpheme.
> This is certainly much harder for me to object to than generative
> accounts of competence. Instead of that distinction, I'd rather go
> back to something like Jakobson's code/message, but to be more precise
> I'd rather use the distinction "communiqu?"/"infrastructure
> communicative". The point of this is that _l'infrastructure
> communiquative_, as applied to phonology, explicitly includes (perhaps
> abstract forms of) the structures and processes that speakers and
> listeners use to map between acoustic data and linguistic signifiers,
> and is constrained further by the fact that this has to have somehow
> been acquired - as I understand the debate following SPE, the question
> of how person's ended up with a knowledge of underlying forms that
> looks almost isomorphic to the phonology of Chaucer's English was
> finessed by the counter-argument that they didn't.
Granted that the SPE theory of English is wrong, I don't any connection
with grand theoretical or methodological principles. Chomsky and
Halle set out with the assumption that stress in English is not
phonemic, which is not totally implausible, but it just turns out
that it's phonemic, after all. Anybody can make little mistakes from
time to time.
>
> Des
> is firmly against competence...
> --
> "[T]he structural trend in linguistics which took root with the
> International Congresses of the twenties and early thirties [...] had
> close and effective connections with phenomenology in its Husserlian
> and Hegelian versions." -- Roman Jakobson
--
Greg Lee <gr...@ling.lll.hawaii.edu>
Greg Lee
> In article <48c7f19.03100...@posting.google.com>,
> lar...@sussex.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote:
> > "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
> > news:<3F81D0...@worldnet.att.net>...
> >
> > > Where I think phonology went wrong was with the "autosegmentalism" of
> > > McCarthy & Prince (I'll always use scare quotes because the "auto-" is
> > > meant to represent "autonomous," not "auto-" 'self') which claims to use
> > > just features and syllables in analysis, but insists on throwing in a
> > > level for "segments," a notion that's merely an artifact of alphabetic
> > > writing and has little to do with the way people produce or hear speech.
> >
> > Peter, this going too far. There exists a great deal of evidence for
> > the psychological reality of segments.
> >
> > For one thing, there is the evidence from speech errors, particular
> > those slips of the tongue of the type called "spoonerisms". These
> > involve the interchange of segments, as in "The Lord is a shoving
> > leopard" (possibly apocryphal, but typical) and "bred and bekfast"
> > (real). Such slips are very frequent, and they have been understood
> > for decades as constituting direct evidence for the reality of
> > segments.
> Also, there are jokes the rely on spoonerisms (i can't think of any
> clean ones right now). These jokes are common in French (a
> contrepetrie; see http://www.bonnesblagues.com/blague/1104/). I don't know about other languages.
Such examples prove nothing, since one can also describe them by
scrambling prosodies in a segment-free theory. If these errors
always involved single segments and never multiple-segment prosodies,
that *would* be evidence for segments. But they don't, as a matter
of fact, always involve a pair of single segments.
> Anday on'tday orgetfay Igpay Atinlay.
If there were a sort of piglatin spoken by illiterates with, e.g.,
"poonersay" instead of "oonerspay", that would be evidence for
segments.
> Do language games like these in other languages lend support to the
> notion of the psychological reality of segments?
Interesting question. It wouldn't be persuasive evidence unless found
in the speech of illiterates.
> What about rhymes and alliteration?
My colleague David Stampe was just telling me yesterday about some
absurdly complicted (so it seemed) Welsh poetic convention which,
he claims, provides evidence for phonemic segments. Sorry I don't
know the details.
> Henry Polard || And I don't stow thrones in grass houses.
--
Greg Lee <gr...@ling.lll.hawaii.edu>
Peter T. Daniels
>
> "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message news:<3F81D0...@worldnet.att.net>...
>
> > Where I think phonology went wrong was with the "autosegmentalism" of
> > McCarthy & Prince (I'll always use scare quotes because the "auto-" is
> > meant to represent "autonomous," not "auto-" 'self') which claims to use
> > just features and syllables in analysis, but insists on throwing in a
> > level for "segments," a notion that's merely an artifact of alphabetic
> > writing and has little to do with the way people produce or hear speech.
>
> Peter, this going too far. There exists a great deal of evidence for
> the psychological reality of segments.
>
> For one thing, there is the evidence from speech errors, particular
> those slips of the tongue of the type called "spoonerisms". These
> involve the interchange of segments, as in "The Lord is a shoving
> leopard" (possibly apocryphal, but typical) and "bred and bekfast"
> (real). Such slips are very frequent, and they have been understood
> for decades as constituting direct evidence for the reality of
> segments.
My very next footnote (21), pp. 103f.:
"The following speech error may provide validation of the Chinese
analysis into initial consonant versus everything else: veteran baseball
announcer Harry Caray frequently pronounced the name of former Chicago
Cubs outfielder Rafael Palmeiro as Palermo, metathesizing the initial
and the final of the middle syllable. Errors of the type Palreimo
(exchanging consonantal segments) or Pamleiro (metathesizing across
syllable boundary) strike me as unlikely in the extreme. (A form
methatesize, if attested, would represent feature, rather than segment,
displacement.)
"Consider also the following speech errors, all collected within a
single week:
"(1) Tonight on Nightline: South African president Bik Potha (ABC staff
announcer, 5/16/88) [correct: Pik Botha.]
"(2) Why have Gorba/k/ev and Rea/j/an been meeting only three times ...
(Russian simultaneous interpreter, Nightline, 5/30/88) [correct:
Gorbachev and Reagan. In (1) and (2), features of Voice Onset Time and
of Obstruent Release Time are misused; is it significant that both are
features of timing?]
"(3) Treadway, the second braceman, breaking to the bag (baseball
play-by-play announcer, 5/30/88) [correct: second baseman. Either an
entire syllable, or the feature of Retroflexion, is anticipated, perhaps
also prompted by the initial /tr/.]
"(4) The end of deever uh vertical integration (Tom Peters, author,
speaking before National Press Club, 5/27/88) [The best example of all:
the complete syllables |di| and |vr| are interchanged but the stress
pattern remains S-W. The alveolar flap in vertical is apparently
underlyingly, as it is phonetically, voiced, contrary to the spelling.
The name of former presidential aide Michael Deaver had been mentioned,
much earlier, in the speech.]"
(All bracketed comments in original)
Jim Heckman
On 7-Oct-2003, Greg Lee <gr...@ling.lll.hawaii.edu> wrote
in message <blv1k7$rsn$1...@news.hawaii.edu>:
> Henry Polard <h_po...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > In article <48c7f19.03100...@posting.google.com>,
> > lar...@sussex.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote:
[...]
> > > For one thing, there is the evidence from speech errors, particular
> > > those slips of the tongue of the type called "spoonerisms". These
> > > involve the interchange of segments, as in "The Lord is a shoving
> > > leopard" (possibly apocryphal, but typical) and "bred and bekfast"
> > > (real). Such slips are very frequent, and they have been understood
> > > for decades as constituting direct evidence for the reality of
> > > segments.
> >
> > Also, there are jokes the rely on spoonerisms (i can't think of any
> > clean ones right now). These jokes are common in French (a
> > contrepetrie; see http://www.bonnesblagues.com/blague/1104/). I don't
> > know about other languages.
>
> Such examples prove nothing, since one can also describe them by
> scrambling prosodies in a segment-free theory. If these errors
> always involved single segments and never multiple-segment prosodies,
> that *would* be evidence for segments. But they don't, as a matter
> of fact, always involve a pair of single segments.
This line of 'reasoning' is startlingly backwards. One might as
well say that Millikan's oil-drop experiment wasn't evidence for
a smallest unit of electric charge, since he also detected
integer multiples of that charge.
Is there really a school of phonology that makes claims like
this?
[...]
--
Jim Heckman
Jacques Guy
lar...@sussex.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote in message news:<48c7f19.03100...@posting.google.com>...
> There exists a great deal of evidence for
> the psychological reality of segments.
[sknip spoonerisms]
> For another thing, we have the evidence from the historical changes we
> call metatheses, in which segments are reordered.
And with some languages reordering the last syllable from CV to VC.
This is very common in Vanuatu. It even affects loanwords,
thus "bell" /belo/ -> /beol/.
> [segments] may
> not be
> *physically* real, given the constraints on the movements of the vocal
> organs, but that is another matter.
There is another argument for segments: they minimize the
"brain space" (as in "disk space") necessary for storing
the vocabulary. As for not physically real, I'd say that
is an effect of the inertia of the phonating organs.
Greg Lee
> [...]
Perhaps you can explain the parallel to me. The only comparison
I can see is that the stream of speech is naturally quantized into
longest intervals during which articulation does not change
significantly -- i.e., during which no prosody begins or ends.
There is no issue here between the segment and non-segment
theories. It's obvious that the stream of speech can be
divided up that way, and that division corresponds to ordinary
segmentation, except in the case of geminates.
My reasoning seems straightforward, to me. When evidence can be
accounted for equally well by two theories, it can't help us
decide between the theories.
> Is there really a school of phonology that makes claims like
> this?
I am not a school.
> [...]
> --
> Jim Heckman
--
Greg Lee <gr...@ling.lll.hawaii.edu>
Jim Heckman
Perhaps then I misunderstand what is meant by "segment" in those
theories that have such a notion, as opposed to "naturally
quantized [...] longest intervals during which articulation does
not change significantly" in those theories that don't. Could
you elaborate, especially as to why only single-'segment'
scrambling can be considered relevant evidence?
[...]
> > Is there really a school of phonology that makes claims like
> > this?
>
> I am not a school.
I'll take that as a "no".
--
Jim Heckman
Greg Lee
...
> Perhaps then I misunderstand what is meant by "segment" in those
> theories that have such a notion, as opposed to "naturally
> quantized [...] longest intervals during which articulation does
> not change significantly" in those theories that don't. Could
> you elaborate, especially as to why only single-'segment'
> scrambling can be considered relevant evidence?
Without segments, a pronunciation is represented as an overlapping
sequence of prosodies. A handy representation is a feature matrix
of the sort familiar in generative phonology, with each column
of pluses and minuses (the feature specifications) taken to be a
snapshot at an instant in time of the articulatory state, or, that
is, the prosodies in effect. But since there are no primitive
segments, the number of columns in the matrix for a given
pronunciation is arbitrary, given that there are sufficient columns
to reflect all changes in articulation.
A column of the matrix is something like a segment in conventional
segmentful theories, but concatenation of such virtual segments
is idempotent: [a] = [aa] = [aaa] ...
I assume that phonological rules work in essentially the same way
as they do in the current theory, except that the feature columns
in the formulations of rules refer to combinations of prosodies
rather than segments. Because it is not possible in current theory
for a phonological rule to refer to all segments preceded or followed
by an articulatorily distinct segment, then in a segment-free theory,
correspondingly, it would not be possible for a rule to refer to a
class of several virtual segments.
Faced with evidence of single-segment scrambling, then, it would be
reasonable to argue that the asegmental theory must be wrong, because
it provides no way of singling out a class of virtual segments and
excluding all clusters, so as to specify the portions of the speech
stream that get scrambled.
--
Greg Lee <gr...@ling.lll.hawaii.edu>
Peter T. Daniels
Even in terms of "brain space," what do we know of the shape of entries
in the mental lexicon? When groping for a word, one comes up with things
first of all with the same syllabic pattern, then with rhymes and/or
assonances.
Alan Hogue
I was under the impression that one can always come up with different
theories to account for the same phenomonon. Like, uh, what was that?
Rutherford and someone else trying to save the Bohr model of the atom.
It was rejected, IIRC, because the theory was needlessly complex.
Ockham's Razor struck again.
Alan H.
Greg Lee
> Jacques Guy wrote:
> >
> > High time to have the subject line reflect the topic, no?
> >
> > lar...@sussex.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote in message news:<48c7f19.03100...@posting.google.com>...
> >
> > > There exists a great deal of evidence for
> > > the psychological reality of segments.
> >
> > [sknip spoonerisms]
> >
> > > For another thing, we have the evidence from the historical changes we
> > > call metatheses, in which segments are reordered.
> >
> > And with some languages reordering the last syllable from CV to VC.
> > This is very common in Vanuatu. It even affects loanwords,
> > thus "bell" /belo/ -> /beol/.
Metathesis may be a problem for asegmental theories, but this particular
instance is probably not. Some metatheses may be described without
reference to segment boundaries as arising by (1) making prosodies
simultaneously rather than sequentially realized, and (2) sequencing
them again, but getting the order "wrong". In /belo/, the [lo] becomes
an o-colored [l], then that breaks into an [ol] sequence. That is at
least possible here because [l] is articulated with the front of the
tongue, leaving the back of the tongue free to distinguish [o] from [u].
However, if you also get a metathesis, e.g., /bego/ -> /beog/, then the
asegmental treatment becomes much more dubious, because the high position
of the back of the tongue needed for [g] should interfere with maintaining
the difference between u-coloring and o-coloring.
The case is similar to that of slips of the tongue. We'd really need to
go into the details of just what metatheses can occur in just what
circumstances to know what this shows about the feasibility of a
non-segmental theory.
[Jacques' and Larry Trask's posts don't show up on my news server, so that's
why I don't reply to them directly.]
--
Greg Lee <gr...@ling.lll.hawaii.edu>
I
jg...@alphalink.com.au (Jacques Guy) wrote:
>And with some languages reordering the last syllable from CV to VC.
>This is very common in Vanuatu. It even affects loanwords,
>thus "bell" /belo/ -> /beol/.
Which Vanuatu languages?
Is this at all related to the famed Rotuman metatheses?
Jacques Guy
> > > And with some languages reordering the last syllable from CV to VC.
> > > This is very common in Vanuatu. It even affects loanwords,
> > > thus "bell" /belo/ -> /beol/.
> Metathesis may be a problem for asegmental theories, but this particular
> instance is probably not. .... In /belo/, the [lo] becomes
> an o-colored [l], then that breaks into an [ol] sequence. That is at
> least possible here because [l] is articulated with the front of the
> tongue, leaving the back of the tongue free to distinguish [o] from [u].
> However, if you also get a metathesis, e.g., /bego/ -> /beog/, then the
> asegmental treatment becomes much more dubious
It was the first example that came to my mind, but this type of
metathesis, final CV -> VC, affects all consonants. I would have
to go and dig up that book with all those wordlists, but I am
too lazy to do so. There is a language, Rarotongan is the name if
I remember correctly, where this hase even taken on a "grammatical
status". By which I mean that nouns have developed two forms:
the original CV...CV, and the metathesized CV...VC, the former
being definite, the latter indefinite (or the other way around,
again, I would have to dig out the data). The resulting final
VVC then became VC, resulting in a richer vowel system (10 instead
of the original 5, again, if I remember correctly).
When I was trying to reconstruct the diachronic phonology of Lehali
(Ureparapara Island, Banks, Vanuatu), I found that it was more
economical to posit a stage where final CV _always_ went to VC.
The resulting VV clusters then gave rise to a... let me count them...
nine-vowel system.
Jacques Guy
> Which Vanuatu languages?
> Is this at all related to the famed Rotuman metatheses?
Ah, yes, Rotuman! That was the name I was groping for
in my other post where I wrote "Rarotongan".
But no, I meant others. As I wrote in my other post
just a few minutes ago, I would have to find my copy
of Tryon's old "Languages of the New Hebrides" or
some title like that. But I haven't used it for
years and I don't know where it is. The example
I gave, "beol", is not in those wordlists of course.
I remembered it from a discussion with a Catholic
priest who did speak that particular language, and
introducing English "bell" as "belo" did strike me
as strange at the time.
Jouni Filip Maho
>
> Even in terms of "brain space," what do we know of the shape of entries
> in the mental lexicon? When groping for a word, one comes up with things
> first of all with the same syllabic pattern, then with rhymes and/or
> assonances.
There used to be a game show on Swedish TV called "Lingo" (some years
ago). Basically, the contestants had to figure out some hidden word by
only seeing a single letter. (There's bound to be a US original to it,
but I wouldn't know its name.)
Anyway, it happened occasionally that they were shown fragments of a
word with a final -a like "_ _ _ _ _ a" or "_ e _ _ a". If one of the
contestants guessed a verb, then all following contestants also guessed
various verbs, as if verbs were being stored in a common mental bag
which they were stuck in.
Granted, most Swedish verbs end with -a, but many nouns do too.
Nonetheless, it seemed very difficult to break the verb-guessing once it
had started.
---
jouni maho
Brian M. Scott
wrote:
[...]
>If there were a sort of piglatin spoken by illiterates with, e.g.,
>"poonersay" instead of "oonerspay", that would be evidence for
>segments.
There are childish mispronunciations like 'pasketti' for
'spaghetti'. I know for a fact that this one has been found in
the speech of a pre-literate child.
[...]
Brian
Brian M. Scott
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
[...]
>My very next footnote (21), pp. 103f.:
>"The following speech error may provide validation of the Chinese
>analysis into initial consonant versus everything else: veteran baseball
>announcer Harry Caray frequently pronounced the name of former Chicago
>Cubs outfielder Rafael Palmeiro as Palermo, metathesizing the initial
>and the final of the middle syllable. Errors of the type Palreimo
>(exchanging consonantal segments) or Pamleiro (metathesizing across
>syllable boundary) strike me as unlikely in the extreme. (A form
>methatesize, if attested, would represent feature, rather than segment,
>displacement.)
How do you classify 'pasketti' (for 'spaghetti') and 'cimmanon'
(for 'cinnamon')?
Brian
Peter T. Daniels
One of the few useful things contemporary phonology has taught us is
that initial /s/ is weird -- it violates the "Sonority Hierarchy" (and
remember that <s> is the only non-syllabic character in the Cherokee
syllabary);
the second example simply switches the last two syllables.
Des Small
> Des Small <des....@bristol.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > In what sense are underlying forms made out of anything?
>
> In the sense that you examine the underlying forms proposed and
> see what's in them. I don't understand this questions.
>
> > Underlying forms (which aren't observable) are operated on by
>
> They are too observable.
How?
[...]
> > This is certainly much harder for me to object to than generative
> > accounts of competence. Instead of that distinction, I'd rather go
> > back to something like Jakobson's code/message, but to be more precise
> > I'd rather use the distinction "communiqué"/"infrastructure
> > communicative". The point of this is that _l'infrastructure
> > communiquative_, as applied to phonology, explicitly includes (perhaps
> > abstract forms of) the structures and processes that speakers and
> > listeners use to map between acoustic data and linguistic signifiers,
> > and is constrained further by the fact that this has to have somehow
> > been acquired - as I understand the debate following SPE, the question
> > of how person's ended up with a knowledge of underlying forms that
> > looks almost isomorphic to the phonology of Chaucer's English was
> > finessed by the counter-argument that they didn't.
>
> Granted that the SPE theory of English is wrong, I don't any connection
> with grand theoretical or methodological principles.
The fundamental problem I have with the SPE account is the sheer
amount of stuff that can get wedged between the underlying and surface
forms.
Before I start saying how, here's J-E Boltanski from _La Linguistique
diachronique_ (all translations perpetrated by me) on the
Neogrammarians:
"""
All the diachronic philosophy of the Neogrammarians is based on [the
opposition between phonetic changes and analogical levelling.] [...]
So the blind, ignorant, "fatal" (the expression is Saussure's) process
of phonetic change opposes the finality of analogical levelling like a
poison and its antidote.
"""
Informally, and motivated by pure prejudice, I expect that systems of
phonetic change acted on by analogical levelling should modify the
underlying form, and that there are limits (imposed by learnability
and the need to be able to parse sequences of sounds) on the extent to
which competency can be expected to recapitatulate diachronology.
Here's Boltanki again, setting out to defend the SPE concept of "rule"
against charges that it's too powerful and makes it too easy to
describe implausible changes.
"""
The question is really this: if a "rule" in the SPE sense isn't just a
(more or less distorted) synchronic projection of a diachronic process
or, rather, often a telescoping together of several distinct processes
(perhaps from very different times), since evidently the internal
reconstruction can only be carried out coarsely and with gaps bearing
in mind what a long sequence of changes can do, the distinction
between "possible rule" and "impossible rule" doesn't seem
satisfactory. If the alternation remains, x and y in different
environments (and not eliminated by history), if the analogical
levelling hasn't taken place, why can't any process whatever be
attested?
"""
His account is meant to be pro-SPE, but the hunger for regularity (and
indifferent to speakers) implicit in that model leads to it working
its way backwards in time to an extent which I am certainly not the
first person to consider implausible in an account of real speakers of
a synchronic stage of the language.
So my big methodological difference with SPE is that without being
constrained by learnability or parsability there is nothing in the
theory that allows analogising insist that adding more rules is
unreasonable and it's time to allow a layer of rules to sediment out
into the underlying forms, even if that makes the description less
"elegant" in some metric.
> Chomsky and Halle set out with the assumption that stress in English
> is not phonemic, which is not totally implausible, but it just turns
> out that it's phonemic, after all. Anybody can make little mistakes
> from time to time.
For sure.
Des
would rather be wrong than formally undecidable.