ABSURDITIES ACCEPTED
    BY MANY LINGUISTS

    © 1996 by Orchid Land Publications

    [updated 6-12-98]

         1. That basic words are hard to borrow and therefore offer a key to the main source of a new language--or a key to the degree of relatedness among two languages. The merest observation of English in the places where it is spoken shows that the words borrowed from indigenous languages are basic words--and names.

        2. That separation produces differences among languages--despite the conservativeness of Icelandic or the fact that at the earliest contact of Europeans with Polynesia (up till the contact produced changes in the languages of Polynesia), these languages were similar and intelligible across thousands of miles--as Capt. Cook's Marquesan interpreter demonstrated. Nomads don't change their languages very much till they settle down and enter extensive contact with other-speaking peoples. That contact provides the conditions for change is not some outlandish, novel view; it is accepted that in the more inbred ecosystems, animals are known to evolve into new (sub)species more rapidly.

         3. That time is tabu in linguistic analysis--a belief apparently shared even among historical linguists who use "synchronic" idiolectal models in their work. That cross-lectal (comparative) and temporal models exist and that time can be a useful and necessary parameter of linguistic analysis is not only obvious to commonsense but in studies like Essays on time-based linguistic analysis (Oxford University Press). Without comparison (of old and new/changed), there could be no rule-generalizations--only ad hoc single-word changes--and chacque mot would have its own separate and individual history!!!! Analysing language is making a movie, not a snapshot.   You can no more really explain much in languages if you ignore time--the origins of language in history and in the individual and known developments till now--than a cosmologist could explain the universe by rejecting any consideration of its history!!

         4. The petitio principii (using your conclusion as your premise) inherent in one prominent linguist's statement (in a major dictionary) that "All of the 100 words . . . are native"--when what is native in English (Germanic or Romance) is precisely what is in question.  The basic error is to prefer a word's derivation over its systematic function.  While "the which," adverbial "-ly," and "in front of" in early English   are Germanic in derivation, they are French in function.  (The first calques laquelle; the second, -ment.  Germanic would have fore--not before or in front of.  As for before, cf. because, which calques French à cause de.)  For the systematic mind, the latter consideration prevails; for the list mentality, the former prevails.

         5. That you can be "scientific" without ignoring one aspect of science that is inseparable from it--system. To study four or five vowels of some kind of English with no correct understanding of their place in the system of relationships to one another is really bogus. Substituting the portrayal of a fragment for the understanding a system--especially when that fragment is analysed in terms of a system different from its own-- is about as unscientific as you can get. See further in Variation in the data (Orchid Land Publications, 1992), p. 67, as well as Essays on time-based linguistic analysis (Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.29-32, 39-40.

         6. Stemming from the preceding error is the use of isoglosses (on which CLICK HERE FOR FURTHER INFORMATION), non-processual morphemes (when when formations are processes), and, above all, phonemes.    (CLICK HERE FOR PHONEMES IN CONNECTION WITH PHONETICS.)  On the last, consider how one could account for the fact that in Cockney and in Scottish English the "non-phonemic" redundant [w]--intercalated between a rounded vowel or dipthongal satellite and a following vowel--became [v] exactly the way the Cockney //w// did?  Phonemic status has nothing to do with that or anything else.

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