Re: Theory on the evolution of Languages

Ben Poplawski said:
> On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 06:37:52 -0400, Afian <yann_kiraly@...> wrote:
>
>>No offense. The following is simply a collection of clarifications.
>
>>1. I didn't say tenses or cases got any simpler or more complex, only
>> that they became more.
>
> "Became more"? Adjust your terminology. Say "the number of tenses
> increased". "Became more" is much too vague.
I don't think it's much too vague, I think it's somewhat less than
perfectly idiomatic. I assume that's because your interlocutor is not a
native speaker of English.

I certainly had no trouble understanding what he meant from the context.


>>2. I said that when I say tenses, I also mean aspects of them.
>
> Well then, specify, specify, specify. Linguistics is a science, and
> linguists are like most scientists: terribly precise people.
I think that's terribly overstated. Most linguistics is not science, most
linguists are not scientists, and most linguists are anything but terribly
precise people. (Some linguistic formalisms can be seen as precise
metalanguages, but most linguists relate them to empirical data on the
ground solely by means of hand-waving. So what they're doing is actually
less precise than if the noticeable regularities in the data had been
succinctly described in clear prose.)

In any event, precision is not necessarily a virtue in scientific models.
Usefulness is always a virtue, though, and precision can be more or less
useful, depending on what the model is to be used for.


-- Mark