the Trask-Hubey debate

[Larry Trask]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, H. M. Hubey wrote:
 
> That is the real reason I post what I do. There are computer programs that
> paint and compose music. Is it really that hard to believe that linguistic
> reconstruction is no less structured?
 
There is no comparison.
 
*Any* piece of paintwork we might produce counts as a painting.  And
*any* piece of music we might produce counts as music.  But it is *not*
true that any "reconstruction" we might produce counts as a
reconstruction.
 
A linguistic reconstruction is an attempt at recovering a real but
unrecorded piece of prehistory, and it is not an attempt at producing an
original work of art.
 
I have little doubt that it would be possible to write a computer
program that would chomp its way through any pile of linguistic data we
chose to dump into it and spit out some kind of result, according to its
instructions.  But I see no reason to suppose that such a result would
be anything but meaningless.
 
> I bring this up, because for a long time the anti-AI crowd used
> arguments similar to those offered often on linguistics lists for
> why AI would be impossible.
 
I do not believe this is true.
 
 
Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK
 
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk