Concerning WALS - Bees, Bats, Butterflies

[Tom Givon]

Well, Martin, I wonder why you are impelled to make such sweeping 
statements, one's that are bound to shoot way beyond the mark. Do you 
really mean that WALS is what will put us on sound empirical 
foundations? At long last? Gets one to wonder what myself and my 
associates (let alone your guru Greenberg) have been doing  with our 
finite earthly time all those pre-WALS years; now don't it?

Now, since you invoke Aristotle, I had better go an record  saying that 
he is the acknowledged founder of biology--not only empirical biology 
with his pioneering classification (according to an ascending degree of 
complexity--practically begging an evolutionary interpretation...), but 
also adaptive-functional--thus THEORETICAL--biology. It took Linaues and 
many before him another 2,000 years to complete Aristotle's 
classification; and it took Darwin another 200 years to find the 
theoretical explanation for the form-function isomorphisms identified by 
Aristotle. But to lump Aristotle (in Biology) as "speculative", like 
Plato, suggests a pretty careless reading of (at least) three of his 
books: De Partibus Animalium, De Generationem Animalium, and Historiae 
Animalium. If you want to delve into the history of scientific 
(observation-based AND theoretical) biology, these books are the place 
to start.

As to how far we are in linguistics from the Darwinian stage: It seems 
to me that you are implying something that for me translates as follows: 
Darwin was hopelessly premature in delving into a theoretical 
explanation of variation in Biology, because in his time many species 
and sub-species of butterflies had not yet been described, let alone 
discovered. Well, here is what I bet you Darwin would have said to that: 
"I had my finches, and apparently they were enough, I didn't need all 
those the extra butterflies to come up with the theory of evolution by 
natural (adaptive) selection".

If  the good folks of WALS  want to make a serious  claim that it is 
premature to do theoretical (explanatory)  linguistics, and thus to 
justify the time & money poured into their admirable enterprise, well, 
all they have to do is convince those of us who know just a bit about 
cross-language diversity (and also about the major source of such 
diversity--diachrony) that they are finding new types of variants, types 
that are so surprising and earthshaking that they manifestly falsify our 
current theoretical understanding (I hate to call what we do "theory", 
but it is definitely "theoretical"). All I can say is, from my remote 
corner, is that most of what I see of the endless compilation of more 
and more descriptions, is a lot of familiar types and sub-types. In 
other words, more and more species and subspecies of butterflies 
described in more and more minute detail. And like Darwin (or, like 
Watson and Crick), I'm inlined to say that the finches we already have 
in hand are enough to at least start building a theoretical, explanatory 
account of language. So all y'all have to do is falsify our predictions.

Best,  TG

==========



Martin Haspelmath wrote:
> If you want to compare Chomsky with someone, I think the best analogy 
> is Socrates -- he asked a number of new questions in a very serious 
> way, without providing answers (Socrates also had clashes with 
> authority, rather fatal ones).
>
> Comparative biology became an empirically-based science long before 
> Darwin, but it was extremely difficult to make sense of the variation 
> until a new way of thinking became possible. Maybe that is the case 
> with comparative linguistics, too. It seems that we are still very far 
> from the Keplerian, Galilean or Darwinian stage.
>
> The World Atlas of Language Structures is primarily an attempt to put 
> comparative linguistics on an empirical foundation. Until recently, it 
> was often based on Platonic or Aristotelian speculation, like medieval 
> biology.
>
> Martin
>> At 10:48 PM -0500 9/11/08, Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
>> snip..
>>
>>>  we need a Copernicus, not a Chomsky or a Greenberg.
>>
>> A reminder that it was Kepler who formulated the planetary laws, and 
>> a comment that Chomsky has in common with Galileo a 
>> discipline-changing body of work (subsequently elevated into a theory 
>> of everything). Both also had clashes with authority although of a 
>> rather different kind. Maybe we haven't yet had our Darwin or 
>> Einstein but to be a Galileo is not to be sniffed at.