Re: *dan-

I took a look at Victor Mansfield's web pages, and I don't think his ideas of synchronicity can be applied to linguistics - or to anything at all. He's just another <insert your favourite expression here>.

I'm instinctively interested in new areas of science, like the "complexity studies" dealing with the properties of self-organizing systems (anyone familiar with Stuart Kauffman's work knows what I'm talking about) - but I'm also instinctively suspicious of people who try to sell things like animal telepathy or dowsing by appealing to people's interest in new, fascinating areas of science, and I avoid people who borrow terms from chaos theory or quantum mechanics only to give their own, weird ideas a more scientific look. They usually say, "Please don't dismiss my theories because they might seem too spectacular to be true, you will find them interesting" - but to me, their ideas are not spectacular or interesting at all, they are dull and they have been sold many times before.

True, there is a conflict between logic and emotion (or whatever terms you want to use) and I agree that this world would be a better place if there was a little more emotion, but these ideas have nothing to do with emotion or 'the spiritual' - they are just the junk that fills the small print ads in cheap mags.

Of the people on this list, I'm among the ones with the least knowledge of linguistics, but even to me linguistics is interesting enough - I don't need mysterious connections between Indo-European and Austronesian languages to make it supposedly 'more' interesting.

Hakan