<Language> Linguistics and Logic

H. Mark Hubey HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu
Wed Mar 17 03:41:20 UTC 1999


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More fun reading. Since the linguistics community itself
 does not clean up its own house, it looks like it has
 to be cleaned by outside forces. Rocket scientists (which is
 a euphemism for physicists and electrical engineers)
 completely changed Wall Street, but they won't do the
 same for linguistics because there is no money in it.

 A stray pseudo-rocket scientist (yours truly) has
 decided that he will overcome forces of darkness in
 linguistics single-handedly :-)

 This is just the beginning. Enjoy.

 BTW, just in case it is not yet clear, this and the
previous post were rejected by the moderator. People
still wonder how Nazis or Communists grab power and hold
it. It's easy, as can be seen. You need some well-meaning
and ignorant collaborators who adore you.

 ---------- Forwarded message ----------
 From: "H. Mark Hubey" <HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu>
 Subject: Re: linguistic features and Logic
 Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 19:19:40 -0500

 Larry Trask wrote:
 >
 > There are countless inflectional systems available for use in
>languages,
> and countless possible phonological forms for expressing any given
 > meaning.  Consequently, data in these areas are typically useful in
 > recovering ancestry.

 As I promised, here is a separate thread.

 Your argument is of the type: there are countless white people, so
 whiteness cannot be used as a marker of geneticity. But of course,it
can be. I am white and my whiteness is from my parents and is genetic.
Even if 80% of the world's humans are white, whiteness is still genetic.

 And there are not "countless inflectional systems". There are more
 people than inflectional systems, and they are finite. I don't know
about you but I am doing science, not metaphorics or English literature
and certainly one cannot create science via hyperbole. It is quite
useful of course for political demogoguery and poetry.

 Additionally, the word "inflectional" as usually used by people like
you also applies to agglutinational. Because of that Comrie suggests
that the word "fusional" should be used. I like to use "infixing" and
reserve postfixing for agglutination where only postfixes/suffixes are
used.

 And finally, the "inflectional" systems might have arisen only once and
mostly IE or AA. One can see in von Soden, who thinks precisely the
opposite of your claim, i.e. that something as rare and strange as
inflection probably was invented only once and spread and that this
makes AA and IE relatives in the long past.

 Obviously most of this is detail that should be discussed after the
basics are agreed upon. I wrote this only because there is a tendency
in discussions in linguistics to constantly go off on a tangent and get
buried in useless detail, for example the "lack of initial r in Akkadian
and Hittite". I read this in a book on Hittite from OI or Puhvel (I
don't recall which) and which I posted recently to sci.lang. Besides all
this, what we call Sumerian or Akkadian comes from accross and over
centuries so that the languages would have changed.

Of course, if the fact that they were changing was due to the substratum
then all of that has to be taken into account. The lack of initial
liquids or their overall weak representation in the ME before IE and AA
has too much evidence to be shoved aside by evasion. We will get to this
again,

 I am sure, after the general ideas get through.

 > > (See Crowley,1992 and especially Nichols' works on this.)
 >
 > But Nichols's work is not really intended to set up language
 >families:  her purposes are otherwise.  I'm afraid I don't know
  > what "Crowley  (1992)" might be, but, if it's the earlier
> edition >of Terry Crowley's HL
 > textbook, I don't understand why it's being cited.

 A thief was hawking a stolen carpet. He yelled out "who will give
 me a hundred dinars for this?" in the bazaar. Someone approached
 him and bought the carpet. A compatriot approached him later and
 asked "Why did you sell that for a hundred dinars?"

 "Uhhh," said the thief "Is there a number bigger than 100?"
                     Idries Shah, in one of his books on Sufis.

 What you see in Nichols' work is not what I see. This phenomenon is
related to a logical fallacy called "argument from ignorance" and
should be called "argument from lack of imagination". People think they
understand something if they have seen it many many times or someone
can  create an analogy to something they have seen many many times.
That  means  if we have a "model" of some kind we feel good about it.
People don't really  have any idea how trees work, but they are not
amazed because there are so many of them and they have seen them so
often. But if they see a computer
 doing graphics or talking they are amazed. I have seen many airplanes
fly but they amaze me all the time despite the fact that I have a PhD in
engineering.

 Bertrand Russell was heckled after a speech by someone who said
 something like "we all know that nothing can stay up in the air. Do you
expect us to believe that the earth stays up in the sky without support?
Everybody knows that it is supported by a giant turtle." Russell thought
finally he had an answer "well then, tell me, what makes the turtle stay
up in the sky?"

 "Ehh," said the womAn, "you can't fool me like that. Everyone knows,
that it is turtles all the way down."

 During the last century when the first train was making its way thru
Germany the train had stopped in some village. The curious villages
gathered around looking at the locomotive. One of them approached the
engineer and said "We've been thinking. We think there is a horse inside
that locomotive."

 The engineer went thru the explanation of expansion of steam, Carnot
cycles, etc. The villagers walked away and talked amongst themselves and
then came back and one of them said "We don't believe that stuff about
energy, pressure, entropy and all that. We still think that there is a
horse inside the locomotive."

Exasparated the engineer asked "Tell me then, what makes the
horse go?".

 The peasants talked to each other for a while and came back

 "There are four little horses inside the hooves."

 This is the problem of "exorcising the ghost from the machine".

 Arguments of the type you have been trying for the last N years do not
impress me at all. They still don't.

 AFter we first understand why the heuristic method works (if it does)
and where are its faults, and where are its weaknesses and how it can be
improved and how we can use propositional logic and probabilistic logic
correctly to infer things we can discuss these. I think for the time
being, all they do is distract. I skipped the rest. They can be dealt
with later.

 I first offered data assuming that you could put the pieces where they
belong. Since it doesn't work, we have to first discuss other things
until we reach the point where the importance of the data and where it
belongs and how it affects conclusions can be better appreciated.

 Please do not write things to digress. Let's stick to the main problem
at hand.


 --
 Best Regards,
 Mark
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