Re: OT: Secret wars

 >From: David Peterson <DigitalScream@...>
 >
 >    This is the quote in question: "Similarly, if you're a linguist, you
 >don't just turn on a tape-recorded and start taping people."  Wow!  Might as
 >well have just said, "What you all say doesn't interest me; what I write for
 >you to say does."  It's like trying to gain information on questions you have
 >all the answers to, supplying the answers, and the verifying the results,

        There's a simple word for this practice: Platonism. :)

        Ooh, now that I think about it, GL looks *terribly* like some
system to manipulate Forms!

        "See, we have this Pure, Beautiful and Universal syntax that
gets all muddled up when we actually, you know, engage our gross
bodies in the actual act of speaking."

        Someone should write a Socratic Dialog pitting a Pragmatist
against a GL type, with both of them trying to puzzle out classical
Greek word order (for which see Helma Dik's "Word Order in Ancient
Greek: A Pragmatic Account of Word Order Variation in Herodotus").

--
wm,
unabashed loather of all Platonic airiness