Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority languages)

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Re: Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority lan

Postby Sizen » Sun May 30, 2021 5:42 am

Lianne wrote:Thanks for laying out what was/is making this discussion so frustrating. I've been using your definition (1), because regardless of whether that's what linguists use, that is what the average person means when they say "old". Latin is older than French because Latin was being spoken long before French existed. It's been frustrating to say things that feel like common sense and then to be talked to like I'm saying something insane. (And then to have people telling me that humans are fish and I'm just supposed to go along with this logic, definitions of words be damned.)

I hope that, conversely, you can see why the claims that you disagree with aren't complete insanity either depending on your perspective. If I were to draw a timeline that shows the transition of Latin into French and labelled it "The History of French" or "The History of Latin in France", both titles would make sense despite French and Latin not being the exact same language. And yet they become more or less interchangeable in this situation. Each label simply shifts the focus. They're two sides of the same coin, so to speak.
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Re: Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority lan

Postby nooj » Sun May 30, 2021 9:30 am

(And then to have people telling me that humans are fish and I'm just supposed to go along with this logic, definitions of words be damned.)
I'm curious, do you not accept evolution?

If you accept that humans are great apes because we descend from great apes, then there's no great leap to accept that humans and also every other tetrapod on the planet (whales, dogs, birds, snakes etc) are also a kind of fish.
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Re: Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority lan

Postby Le Baron » Sun May 30, 2021 10:46 am

nooj wrote:
(And then to have people telling me that humans are fish and I'm just supposed to go along with this logic, definitions of words be damned.)
I'm curious, do you not accept evolution?

If you accept that humans are great apes because we descend from great apes, then there's no great leap to accept that humans and also every other tetrapod on the planet (whales, dogs, birds, snakes etc) are also a kind of fish.


I'm curious, do you not accept species differentiation? Different (yet ultimately related) organisms with varying characteristics and an actual place in time in terms of their development? By this point of differentiation you have facts such as humans (or baboons or lions for that matter..) not being able to breed with currently existing fish or snakes. Genetic alterations within a species define that species and don't move to another species and also define it as not just a simple continuation of its origins.

What you are doing here is making a comparison argument between language origins and origin of species and then asserting that someone questioning the classification or moment in time when a language appeared, as a defined entity, is therefore in denial of 'evolution' by comparison. Please don't do this. I'm afraid that line of argument is not legitimate, it is futile and moribund.
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Re: Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority lan

Postby Saim » Sun May 30, 2021 11:37 am

How can it be “illegitimate” if it is the standard paradigm in biology? Of course nooj accepts speciation, he explicitly mentioned it several times and cladistic categorisation doesn’t make any sense without it.



https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/clad/clad5.html

Cladistics is useful for creating systems of classification.

Cladistics is now the most commonly used method to classify organisms. Why do we need to classify organisms? Well, consider the bewildering variety of organisms that have ever lived on Earth, from jellyfish to bacteria — that's what paleontologists do for a living. How is it possible that paleontologists, let alone other biologists, are able to communicate their ideas about such a diverse topic as the history of life? Well, it's obvious that a system of classification is needed. That is, we need words like beetle or conifer so that we can talk about many organisms at one time. In fact, the history of formal classification schemes in biology is long, dating from the 1700s, well before Darwin proposed his theory of natural selection. Today, cladistics is the method of choice for classifying life because it recognizes and employs evolutionary theory.


Of course, the trick here is that what we generally refer to as “fish” is not a valid genetic grouping (as most fish are more closely related to us than to, say, stingrays). That doesn’t mean that “fish” in the popular imagination don’t exist, just that it’s either a cultural or typological category rather than a properly taxonomic one (and to turn it into a clade you have to include humans).
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Re: Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority lan

Postby Le Baron » Sun May 30, 2021 12:39 pm

Saim wrote:How can it be “illegitimate” if it is the standard paradigm in biology? Of course nooj accepts speciation, he explicitly mentioned it several times and cladistic categorisation doesn’t make any sense without it..

But I'm not questioning classification in biology. Isn't that clear? I'm questioning the underhanded way of pretending that if someone tries to talk about a language entity as not being equal to its antecedents, they are somehow, by means of analogy, the type of person who rejects evolutionary theory. Or that their logic is heading in that direction. In fact it doesn't hold as an argument for either languages or natural evolution.

Saim wrote:Of course, the trick here is that what we generally refer to as “fish” is not a valid genetic grouping (as most fish are more closely related to us than to, say, stingrays). That doesn’t mean that “fish” in the popular imagination don’t exist, just that it’s either a cultural or typological category rather than a properly taxonomic one (and to turn it into a clade you have to include humans).

Well yes, but there's a persistent problem here. Humans or e.g. dogs being on the same evolutionary line as boned fish does not make them 'fish' or 'essentially fish' any more or less than it makes them bananas or goats.
If people are going to default to 'you're basically an arthropod/tetrapod' whilst at the same time waxing lyrical about differentiation, they're being disingenuous.

Also it needs to be removed from this discussion because it is not completely analogous to language dissemination, use, structure etc. Which is interfered with by humans.It's an attempt to be 'clever'.
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Re: Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority lan

Postby Le Baron » Sun May 30, 2021 12:55 pm

Also that's my last post in this thread, because it's exasperating. I don't want to end up warned or banned because folk end up rushing to the report button.

It's very sunny outside and there are better things to do than continuously navigate this confused warren of never-ending ruses and stratagems.
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Re: Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority lan

Postby Cainntear » Sun May 30, 2021 1:35 pm

Sizen wrote:In this thread I'm seeing two broad definitions of the words old and age, as well as two further subdivisions of one of those definitions, and I think they're causing lots of issues.

Or to put it another way: there are two senses to the word "old": the opposite of young, and the opposite of new.

In my last message, I described Ancient Greek as "old", and I described conlangs as "new". This was deliberate: I just don't think languages have age at all.
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Re: Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority lan

Postby Sizen » Sun May 30, 2021 3:30 pm

Le Baron wrote:I'm questioning the underhanded way of pretending that if someone tries to talk about a language entity as not being equal to its antecedents, they are somehow, by means of analogy, the type of person who rejects evolutionary theory.

Emphasis mine.

For anyone still interested in what has gone on here, many of us aren't entirely against the bolded claim. In fact, it's what we tried to argue for Basque: that Basque isn't equal to its antecedents. We even mentioned historical linguistics work that shows Basque has not been static for its entire history even if it has been conservative during the time we've had records of it. We can tell because of the differences between dialects of current day Basque that older forms of Basque must have looked different to modern day Basque (synchronic analysis). We can also tell that it has changed because Basque imported a sizeable chunk of Latin vocabulary back in the day and that those words have since changed from how they should look (diachronic analysis). These are tried and true methods of historical linguistics initially developed through the comparison of languages that actually do have records and that have proven time and again to be invaluable ressources in uncovering linguistic relationships and reconstructing older forms of languages with and without records.

When these arguments and their evidence were brushed aside, many of us tried to show instead how it is unfair to make the claim that Latin and French are not the same if you view Basque and Proto-Basque the same because the same logic should, in our mind and in the mind of many linguists, apply for both languages. This view holds that you either have to accept that both are the same or that neither are the same. By nature, this sort of discussion is more of an exercise in thought than an evidence based discussion.

I say this not to revive the debate, but rather to hopefully show that not everyone is engaging in stratagems or word play or whatever we made be accused of. We're trying to engage in a good faith dialogue about why we feel a certain kind of logic doesn't make much sense to us or fit with linguistic consensus. As I've said before, it seems to me that the arguments being made are internally consistent. They simply don't make sense to me when applied to a broader view of languages.

I'm sorry that this has felt like an exercise in futility for many on all sides. All I personally hope for is that we can come to a mutual understanding even if that means we still fundamentally disagree.
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Re: Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority lan

Postby Le Baron » Sun May 30, 2021 4:05 pm

Sizen wrote:When these arguments and their evidence were brushed aside, many of us tried to show instead how it is unfair to make the claim that Latin and French are not the same if you view Basque and Proto-Basque the same because the same logic should, in our mind and in the mind of many linguists, apply for both languages. This view holds that you either have to accept that both are the same or that neither are the same. By nature, this sort of discussion is more of an exercise in thought than an evidence based discussion.


I said I wouldn't post again, but I should address this point. I don't think that this is the straitjacketed choice on offer at all: that there is a single logical construct which must apply to all cases. This is neither science nor mathematics. That Basque will have altered over time (as has e.g. Welsh), but most likely has a strong sense of unity running through it, is not the same as essentially new languages that arise from the meeting of multiple sources. Something I addressed by invoking the case of English, which is not merely "German" or "Norman French" or "Norse". French is not "Latin". Everyone needs to get over this fact.
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Re: Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority lan

Postby Sizen » Sun May 30, 2021 4:16 pm

Le Baron wrote:I said I wouldn't post again, but I should address this point. I don't think that this is the straitjacketed choice on offer at all: that there is a single logical construct which must apply to all cases. This is neither science nor mathematics. That Basque will have altered over time (as has e.g. Welsh), but most likely has a strong sense of unity running through it, is not the same as essentially new languages that arise from the meeting of multiple sources. Something I addressed by invoking the case of English, which is not merely "German" or "Norman French" or "Norse". French is not "Latin". Everyone needs to get over this fact.

We have both had a chance to summarise our positions and continue to disagree. I think that that brings the discussion between the two of us to a neat close. Perhaps we can at least agree on that.
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