Re: I'm Back & New SpecGram Article

David J. Peterson skrev:
> t. the s. wrote:
> <<
> I sense that you are not too fond of monsieur Chomsky and his insistence
> on binary branching? ;)
>  >>
>
> Hee, hee...  Apparently the whole idea came from a 19th century
> (or early 20th?) German psychiatrist, who said that all things can
> be divided into two parts.  According to the morphology guy
> down at UCSD, this directly influenced Chomsky's decision.  I
> have no evidence to present for or against this; just repeating what
> I've heard.  It doesn't seem unlikely, though.  Oddball things have
> influenced facets of various theories in significant ways over the
> years...
Hegel had a notion of triplets which had a strong influence
on Grimm when formulating 'Grimm's Law', and led him to assume
a symmetry between the input and output -- by conflating the
notions of aspiration and fricativeness -- which did not in
fact exist.  As it happened Rask's formulation of the Germanic
consonant shift was both prior to Grimm's and free of such
nonsense, but alas he published it in Danish, and so we are
stuck with the name 'Grimm's Law'...


--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    "Maybe" is a strange word.  When mum or dad says it
    it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
    means "no"!

                            (Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)