Re: R: Moraic codas [was Re: 'Yemls Morphology]

My mail was based on my own impressions, and on what I generally do: I find
myself more often deleting unread mails about the amisyllabicity of a given
English consonant than mails about the definition, for instance, of what is
an active language. The actual reason is, anyway, that I generally find some
subjects simpler than others. Perhaps that's only my very little experience,
but phonology is not exactly the simplest thing I've found on my layman's
path into linguistics - until now, at least.

Luca

> > And wrote:
> >
> > > > But you surely know much, much more than I do on this matter...
> > >
> > > Not really. The nice thing about phonology is that you don't need to
know
> > > a lot in order to do it.
> >
> > <retranslating from Italian into English>
> >
> > "Phonology has, within social sciences, the same innovator task nuclear
> > physics has had, for instance, within numeric sciences"
> > Lévi-Strauss
> >
> > It's true we don't need the most modern labs in order to study
phonologic
> > structures of languages, while phisicians use the most modern
technologies
> > to study muons etc. Our mouth's often enough, true, but phonology is not
> > _so_ simple :-)
> >
> > Luca
>
> Although I was being flippant, I really do think it is easy compared to
> pretty much any other area of linguistics, tho the reasons for it being
> easier vary according to which other area it is being compared to.
> (Obviously not all linguisticians, given their various intellectual
> strengths and weaknesses, would agree with me, of course.)
>
> The Levi-Strauss quote is apt and admirably cited, the sort of pertinent
> erudition that experience has taught me to expect from Italians. But
> its claim was a big mistake, for unfortunately nothing outside phonology
is
> as simple as phonology and believing otherwise is a seductive fantasy
> fit for nothing but being taught to hapless undergraduates.
>
> --And.
>