Concerning WALS - Bees, Bats, Butterflies

[Martin Haspelmath]

If you want to compare Chomsky with someone, I think the best analogy is 
Socrates -- he asked a number of new questions in a very serious way, 
without providing answers (Socrates also had clashes with authority, 
rather fatal ones).

Comparative biology became an empirically-based science long before 
Darwin, but it was extremely difficult to make sense of the variation 
until a new way of thinking became possible. Maybe that is the case with 
comparative linguistics, too. It seems that we are still very far from 
the Keplerian, Galilean or Darwinian stage.

The World Atlas of Language Structures is primarily an attempt to put 
comparative linguistics on an empirical foundation. Until recently, it 
was often based on Platonic or Aristotelian speculation, like medieval 
biology.

Martin
> At 10:48 PM -0500 9/11/08, Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
> snip..
>
>>  we need a Copernicus, not a Chomsky or a Greenberg.
>
> A reminder that it was Kepler who formulated the planetary laws, and a 
> comment that Chomsky has in common with Galileo a discipline-changing 
> body of work (subsequently elevated into a theory of everything). Both 
> also had clashes with authority although of a rather different kind. 
> Maybe we haven't yet had our Darwin or Einstein but to be a Galileo is 
> not to be sniffed at.
-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at eva.mpg.de)
Max-Planck-Institut fuer evolutionaere Anthropologie, Deutscher Platz 6	
D-04103 Leipzig      
Tel. (MPI) +49-341-3550 307, (priv.) +49-341-980 1616

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