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,Ķ
Ķwhich is not necessarily positive or interesting.Ķ
Ķ The most recent exchange between Isaac Fried and David Kummerow is a caselike so many such ideologues, he just blows off the criticism and soldiers
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 biggest problem with his theories is that too often he is wrong. But
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.
The problem is, where do you draw the line?
John M. Linebarger
PhD Computer Science (so Hebrew and linguistics are avocations, not
vocations)
Albuquerque, NM
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