Sociological Linguistics

[Tom Wier]

"Patrick C. Ryan" wrote:

>> -- this may be true, but it's utterly irrelevant to the languages under
>> discussion here.  All _extant_ languages are of the same general level of
>> development, whether PIE or Esperanto.

>> Any more "primitive" stage of linguistic development is lost.  None of the
>> languages of which we have records show any such 'simplicity'.  They are all
>> about the same, at the fundamental level of serving the purposes of human
>> communication.

> Pat responds:

> "Irrelevant" must be your favorite word. What happened to your "*in any
> era*"? Have you just dropped that idea without acknowledging how
> wrong-headed it is?

> What "extant" languages show is totally irrelevant to what they may have
> been like in the far distant past.

(a) Linguistics must procede under the assumption that the kinds of
phenomena that we see today have always been that way.  We cannot
go around assuming that entirely unprecedented changes or features
were the case centuries or millennia earlier.  They might well have been,
but, methodologicly speaking, *there is no way to prove that*.  Any
processes you do claim existed would be entirely lacking in empirical
foundation, by definition, and thus subject to a high probability of error
(here we're getting back to Aristotle's fundamental problem).

(b) So, what extant languages show might well be entirely relevant,
if there is no methodological means to reconstruct the protolanguage.
When you are trying to describe a language, you have to know what
it is first -- and when you're dealing with reconstructed languages, this
is an iffy business at best. Also, if the known data about extant languages
all disagree fundamentally with a hypothesis, it is the duty of the linguistic
establishment not to accept that hypothesis as true unless further evidence
comes along to reinforce it (which could happen).

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Tom Wier <artabanos at mail.utexas.edu>
AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704
<http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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