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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Science, linguistics, and stamp-collecting
In-Reply-To: rudolph@cis.umassd.edu's message of Wed, 12 Oct 1994 19:58:07 GMT
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Date: Fri, 14 Oct 1994 19:21:17 GMT
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In article <CxKssy.Jss@umassd.edu> rudolph@cis.umassd.edu (Lee Rudolph) writes:

>carl@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU (Carl J Lydick) writes in sci.skeptic:

>>Consider, for example, the fairly recent history of comparative linguistics:
>>It was traditionally in the category of "stamp collecting:"  All the
>>practitioners were doing was trying to find a way to classify observations.
>>Then a few decades ago, the practitioners started to develop the guts to make
>>predictions, and the field has actually, since then, proven useful.

>I'd be interested to see if any of the denizens of sci.lang have comments in
>response to this last paragraph.  [Followups sent back to sci.skeptic as well
>as to sci.lang.]

I'd be interested in having two things defined:  "Prediction" and "usefulness."

To my mind, Saussure's addition of two _coefficients sonantiques_ which
affected vowel quality to the reconstructed phonemic inventory of Proto-Indo-
European is in some ways predictive:  It allowed the recognition of certain
orthographic elements in Hittite cuneiform as reflecting consonants lost in
other IE languages, rather than as evidence against the IE status of Hittite.

That was 1879 and 1927, both something more than "a few decades ago."

I am frequently assured, by those who know me and my area of specialization in
linguistics well, that none of it is useful.

So please expand on the telegraphic comments in the quoted paragraph, that we
may understand what particular predictions you have in mind, and how they are
to be seen as useful.

-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
