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  • From: jmlineb AT comcast.net (John M. Linebarger)
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] Speaking only for myself ...
  • Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 19:16:34 +0000

I am a lurker on b-hebrew but more active on b-greek, and I am struck by the
difference between the two groups. There is much more controversy on
b-hebrew, which is not necessarily positive or interesting. The most recent
exchange between Isaac Fried and David Kummerow is a case in point.

Quite frankly, speaking only for myself, what I find tedious is Isaac's
persistent refusal either to study linguistics or to accept its results as
being normative for that discipline. Isaac appears to wish that lingistics
was much more like mathematics, but it is not. So he appears to fight it
instead of accepting it and working within it. As a result, what he puts
forward often appears to be gibberish to the linguistics community. If the
goal is to change the field of linguistics, a prerequisite would appear to be
both an understanding of it and a willingness to use its medium of discourse
to communicate the need for change.

My humble request is that unprofitable exchanges like this latest one either
be minimized or eliminated in future. A ground rule for posting would appear
to be a willingness to express oneself in commonly accepted terms of
discourse in the linguistic community. Failure to do that is simply a
conscious choice not to be understood, which dooms the communication to be
ineffective at the start.

John M. Linebarger
PhD Computer Science (so Hebrew and linguistics are avocations, not vocations)
Albuquerque, NM




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