apply exact or objective methods

[A. Katz]

Touche! I misspoke. You are right. I should not have mentioned "belief."

What I meant was, have you seen any historical evidence of the development 
of clicks from non-clicks? Or of oral sounds becoming pharyngeal? Is the 
development documented to have occurred in either direction?

   --Aya


On Sun, 31 Oct 2010, Yuri Tambovtsev wrote:

> Aya Katz wrote=
> Yuri,
> The answer to your question might depend on whether we believe in
> monogenesis or not.
> = That's it! Linguistics is a set of believers. Linguists just believe or not. Usually, they do not care to apply exact or objective methods. Why should I believe in monogenesis of language? Or on the contrary, why should I not believe in monogenesis? Is linguistics a science or a religion? Is linguistics just for believers? Why should a linguist be a beliver if he can prove theories, like in biology, chemistry, physics, etc? Why should I belive that this language has a lot of gutturals if I can calculate them? Write back to yutamb at mail.ru Be well, Yuri Tambovtsev, Novosibirsk, Russia
>
>