Russian word for "cognate"

[Don Livingston]

It seems many words at the very heart of linguistics have never received
clear definition, not just the word "language".  The word "word" has never
been defined to me in any of my linguistics classes.  Nominative _stol_
and genitive _stola_ -- are they the same word but with different
case-endings, or are they in fact different words?  Despite high-level
phonology courses, the word "syllable" has never been defined to my
satisfaction.  (Indeed recent data quite complicates the issue of what can
a "syllabic nucleus".) This is not so different, I suppose, than other
disciplines.  From algebra to geometry to calculus I never received a
proper definition for "point", yet we discussed points all the time and
seemed to get along quite decently without precise definition.  Yet it
somehow leaves one's mental constructs less satisfying than what one might
hope for.

All the best, Don.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Don Livingston                          (Graduate Student)
4500 Whitman Ave. North #2              Dept. Slav. Lang. & Lit., DP-32
Seattle, WA 98103                       University of Washington
Phone/Fax (206) 634-1539                Seattle, WA  98195


On Sat, 11 Mar 1995, Ernest Scatton wrote:

> Regarding words in linguistics with rather different meanings:
>
> I suppose "language" is one as wellHere is something from Noam
> Chomsky, Modular Approaches to the Study of the Mind, which struck
> me as interesting in this regard: "In fact it [language, e.s.]
> is not one of the things in the real world; that is, it isn't a thing
> out there. Whatever it is, it's some sort of complex derived notion,
> maybe no notion: In fact, it doesn't seem to be a linguistic notion,
> at least not linguistically definable." (p. 26)
>
> Ernie Scatton
>