Re: [tied] Re: Ford -furta- fare

On Tue, 23 Jan 2001 23:06:28 -0000, "stefan"
<stefan@...> wrote:

>From: "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...>
>
>It all depends what you're after. Both poetry and linguistics are
>worthwhile occupation but please don't mix them up. If we want to
>study things like the origin of words, language relationships, etc.,
>rigour is a virtue.
>**********
>
>How can you study linguistics without relating it to poetry and
>literature?

The same way one can study linguistics without relating it to the
physics of sound waves: by recognizing the different layers (language
is built out of sound waves, but has its own independent rules; poetry
is built out of language, but lives by its own rules). They are at
different levels of abstraction. Certainly there are interfaces
between the two (acoustic phonetics between acoustics and linguistics,
for instance), which are interesting fields in themselves. In fact,
linguistics was born out of the desire to preserve and cultivate
poetry and literature (e.g. Pa:n.ini), but could only become useful
once the two were rigurously separated (e.g. Pa:n.ini).

>Where do linguists find their material to study? Poetry
>and literature explore language to its limits. Perhaps, they even
>finds inspiration in those strangely accidental connections between
>unrelated words, which you reject because they do not fit into your
>standard constraints. I am not mixing them up, because they are
>already hopelessly mixed up without my help. ;-)
>
>The Cybalist describes itself: "Discussing matters of Indo-European
>history, linguistics and culture". Is studying culture (poetry,
>literature etc) from the linguistic point of view not rigorous or
>virtuous enough for you? Come off it, Piotr. :-)

But I thought you were talking about studying language from the
cultural (poetry, literature, etc.) point of view.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...