An Epilogue to our Discussion...

[alex gross]

> Well, Chomsky did say that he thought that linguistics might
> have nothing to offer to the teaching of a language, which is
> an extraordinary enough thing to say. Alas, he was right (at
> least in his own case).
> Tahir

Yes, and he also made an attempt to cover his derriere on MT as
follows: `as for machine translation and related enterprises,
they seemed to me pointless as well as probably quite hopeless.'*

But the whole history and development of the mainstream
movement under its various names favored the opposite direction.

Thanks, Tahir, for being the only one to reply to my message after
almost four days...could it just be because it was pretty
unansweable...?

All the best to everyone, including Fritz!

alex

*Chomsky, Noam (1975) The Logical Structure of Linguistic
Theory, p. 40, University of Chicago Press.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tahir Wood" <twood at uwc.ac.za>
To: "Funknet" <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>; "alex gross" 
<language at sprynet.com>; "Frederick J Newmeyer" <fjn at u.washington.edu>
Sent: Friday, November 05, 2010 2:39 AM
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] An Epilogue to our Discussion...




>>> "alex gross" <language at sprynet.com> 11/4/2010 10:46 pm >>>
If the entire medical profession can admit both tacitly and publicly that
their theoretical and research fundamentals are not in order, would it
really be too much to ask for the sages of TGG to do the same?

I guess it would...


Well, Chomsky did say that he thought that linguistics might have nothing to 
offer to the teaching of a language, which is an extraordinary enough thing 
to say. Alas, he was right (at least in his own case).
Tahir




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