[Corpora-List] Do you think LINGUISTICS is SCIENCE or ARTS?

[Mike Maxwell]

Yuri Tambovtsev wrote:
> But can 
> linguists reconstruct Latin on the basis of Italian, Spanish, French and 
> other Romance languages? The answer is NO. 

I think the answer is partially.  It's the same answer as trying to 
reconstruct the proto-mammal from modern mammals, or the proto-galaxy 
from the present distribution of stars.  There are multiple paths to a 
given situation, and a little thing called entropy tends to get in the 
way.

 > If linguistics had been
 > SCience, then it would have been possible.

If by this criterion linguistics isn't a science, then neither are 
biology and astronomy.
-- 
    Mike Maxwell
    What good is a universe without somebody around to look at it?
    --Robert Dicke, Princeton physicist

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