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> No, the natural conclusion is that whether two varieties are "the same language" or "different forms of the same language" is a cultural question, not a scien

by baddox 7y ago

> No, the natural conclusion is that whether two varieties are "the same language" or "different forms of the same language" is a cultural question, not a scientific one that can be answered objectively. It's a question that linguists (who are scientists) strive to answer in ways that are useful to studying, reasoning about, and explaining language. It's not much different than the species problem in biology. Everyone knows that speciation happens gradually, but scientists still propose ways of defining and explaining speciation to aid in scientific inquiry. The labels and dividing lines themselves are not empirically observed, of course, but that doesn't mean they're unscientific or outside the purview of scientific inquiry.

umanwizard 7y ago
Do you have any examples of serious papers written by serious linguists debating whether X and Y are the same language or not? I would be very surprised if such a thing exists.
- baddox 7y ago
  As far as I know, there generally aren’t papers that contain debates between multiple linguists. Scientific papers usually aren’t written as debate transcripts. But there are certainly many papers about dead languages, and about the lines between languages. You can look at pretty much any of the citations on Wikipedia articles about dead languages like a Middle English, or creole languages.
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    > Scientific papers usually aren’t written as debate transcripts. Sure they are, although a debate wouldn't be contained in one paper written collaboratively by debating authors, as you seem to imagine -- it would play out over a series of papers, each of which cites previous papers and claims they're wrong. For example, Timm 1989[1] argues that modern Breton is a VSO language, disputing the claims of Varin 1979[2], who claims it is SVO, which in turn disputes the traditional understanding that it is indeed VSO. Or the famous paper of Haspelmath 2011[3] citing many other authors' proposed approaches to word segmentation and arguing that they're all wrong (i.e., that "word" is not a meaningfully defined concept in linguistics). Where are the papers that you claim exist about the lines between languages? If this is really something mainstream linguists care about, you should be able to give examples in non-fringe journals. I just checked the citations on the Wikipedia article for Middle English like you suggested, and found zero papers about whether Middle English should be considered "the same language" as modern English. Can you tell me which ones specifically you mean? [1]: Timm, L. (1989). "Word Order in 20th Century Breton". Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, Vol. 7, No. 3, Special Celtic Issue, pp. 361-378 (https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/4047723 https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/4047723) [2]: Varin, A. (1979). "VSO and SVO Order in Breton". Archivum Linguisticum 10, pp. 83-101 [3]: Haspelmath, M. (2011). The indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of morphology and syntax. Folia Linguistica, 45(1). (https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.2011.002 https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.2011.002)

by baddox 7y ago

umanwizard 7y ago

Do you have any examples of serious papers written by serious linguists debating whether X and Y are the same language or not? I would be very surprised if such a thing exists.

baddox 7y ago
As far as I know, there generally aren’t papers that contain debates between multiple linguists. Scientific papers usually aren’t written as debate transcripts. But there are certainly many papers about dead languages, and about the lines between languages. You can look at pretty much any of the citations on Wikipedia articles about dead languages like a Middle English, or creole languages.
- umanwizard 7y ago
  > Scientific papers usually aren’t written as debate transcripts. Sure they are, although a debate wouldn't be contained in one paper written collaboratively by debating authors, as you seem to imagine -- it would play out over a series of papers, each of which cites previous papers and claims they're wrong. For example, Timm 1989[1] argues that modern Breton is a VSO language, disputing the claims of Varin 1979[2], who claims it is SVO, which in turn disputes the traditional understanding that it is indeed VSO. Or the famous paper of Haspelmath 2011[3] citing many other authors' proposed approaches to word segmentation and arguing that they're all wrong (i.e., that "word" is not a meaningfully defined concept in linguistics). Where are the papers that you claim exist about the lines between languages? If this is really something mainstream linguists care about, you should be able to give examples in non-fringe journals. I just checked the citations on the Wikipedia article for Middle English like you suggested, and found zero papers about whether Middle English should be considered "the same language" as modern English. Can you tell me which ones specifically you mean? [1]: Timm, L. (1989). "Word Order in 20th Century Breton". Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, Vol. 7, No. 3, Special Celtic Issue, pp. 361-378 (https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/4047723 https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/4047723) [2]: Varin, A. (1979). "VSO and SVO Order in Breton". Archivum Linguisticum 10, pp. 83-101 [3]: Haspelmath, M. (2011). The indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of morphology and syntax. Folia Linguistica, 45(1). (https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.2011.002 https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.2011.002)