Re: The amazing Dr. Smith (was Re: Active case-marking natlangs)

Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:

> Apparently, Mr. Smith misunderstands my posts ON PURPOSE.  And what he
> writes is often hardly understandable at all.  To wit:
>
> > >It apparently also shows what we have already seen in Mohawk - that
> > >active marking has little to do with whether a verb is actually active
> > >or not:
> >
> > It does not show that at all. All it shows is that active marking and case
> > marking are not the same thing. It says absolutely nothing about the
> > semantics of the verb or how they express activity.
>
> I don't have the faintest idea what he tries to say in this paragraph!
> All I can read out of it (and much other of his writing) is: "Oh dear,
> you are all clueless idiots who don't know what they are talking about;
> you are soooooo wrong, but I won't explain you why you are wrong because
> you won't understand it anyway!"
>
> I'd rather say that he has nothing meaningful to say about Tokana and
> Nur-ellen at all; to him, this discussion seems to fulfill only one
> single purpose: to show us all what a cool, learned guy he is and how
> little the rest of the list knows about his field of expertise.  He
> found some people on the list use his favourite linguistic term
> discussing their conlangs, and decided to slam this precious little term
> out of the hands of those Unchosen Amateurs (TM).  And because he
> couldn't find a real mistake in the ways those Unchosen Amateurs (TM)
> use it, he adopted a strategy of mis-reading their posts and coming up
> with entirely bogus ideas about the amateurs' view of the matter in
> order to ridicule them, and of baffling them with some deeply
> obfuscated, entirely unintelligible techspeak.
>
> Sorry, Mr. Smith, but you have failed.  All that buggaboo doesn't
> impress me in the least, it is all too riudiculous.
> Frankly, I could harly care less about what he thinks Nur-ellen (or, for
> that matter, Tokana) is.
Joerg, what is wrong with you these days?  I'm used to thinking of you as a
reasonable guy, but lately you've been doing an awful lot of flaming (first Brian
Phillips, and now Marcus).

I don't see how you could construe Marcus's posts as condescending or insulting.
He's simply defending a particular usage of the term "active".  If you disagree
with that usage, fine, but that's no reason to go accusing Marcus of intellectual
elitism.  Please calm down, OK?

All the best,
Matt.