X>Y>X

[H.M.Hubey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
bwald wrote:
 
> Mark replied:
> >In order to produce a list of cognates all you need is a dictionary.
>
> Unh Unh.  Wrong!  As Larry implied in his message about wrong morpheme
> cuts, you also need a GRAMMAR (which dictionaries usually don't supply, at
> least not in sufficient detail).  Dictionaries do not generally analyse
> WORDS into MORPHEMES, esp if the morphemes are derivational affixes of
> varying degrees of obscurity.  Amateurs (and even some professionals)
> produce a lot of crap by using dictionaries (of languages whose grammars
> they are ignorant of), and arbitrarily inserting morpheme boundaries to fit
> preconceived cognates into procrustean molds by getting rid of the "bad"
> stuff.  Such practices conceitedly ape the more judicious use of the
> technique by more RESPONSIBLE linguists, who nevertheless sometimes make
> mistakes with that reconstructive technique.  At least when responsible
> linguists indulge in the technique (responsible amateurs included) they
> continue to take seriously the issue of the historical significance of the
> stuff they snipped off.
 
Let me rephrase it.
 
It should be obvious to everyone by now that Starostin is way ahead of
the game than the 99% of the subscribers. It should be clear by now
that if he has already built up a database of lexicons of various
languages
with their meanings, writeable in ASCII, Unicode etc, he has
singlehandedly
done what should have been done by the linguistics community. But that
is
not all.
 
If there are people who are writing programs to paint (yes, produce
art),
and compose music, it takes no genius to see that even if Starostin only
wrote (or got a student to write) a brute-force, dumb program on a
commodity
grade PC, he can uncover relationships that many humans cannot do, even
if
they collaborate.  The reason for this will take too long to explain.
But given a set of words (and their meanings) even a brute-force
program can keep cranking 24 hours a day to produce cognates via regular
sound changes, clusters, and things that a typical linguist does not
even
know exists.
 
It's too bad that the attitude of most linguists is, in fact, the most
damaging to themselves and their own professions. But, that is the way
evolution is. Short term goals and intuition only go so far.
--
Best Regards,
Mark
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