🚀 go-pugleaf

misrael@csi.uottawa.ca (Mark Israel) writes:

>>> "The rate of change of a language is a constant"...)
>>
>> Where did you get this from?

>   From Rich Alderson (an apparent expert on historical linguistics 
>who posts frequently to sci.lang and to alt.usage.english).  I had 
>written, "What I recall reading in the book _In Search of the Indo-
>Europeans_ is that among recorded ancient languages, Sanskrit and 
>Latin were closest to the reconstructed original; and that among 
>modern languages, Lithuanian is closest."  He responded, "Point of 
>order.  They have all, *by definition*, diverged to the same 
>extent."  

"Dogma" is not the proper word for that. "Bare-faced, shameless lie"
is.

Amazing. On LINGUIST, last week, there was someone bleating
"I have a very simple question: What are we doing wrong to
be on the receiving end of items like the following?"
The main item had been posted on comp.ai.natlang under the
title "An AI fable: Borne and the Wheel (a bit long)" and
was a wonderfully written fable about the preposterous dogmas
with which linguistics is... yes, *infested*.

Real linguistics at any rate, that is, hands-on, monolingual
fieldwork, has had me unlearn just about everything I had
been taught.