Re: [tied] Pat's ProtoWorld Playland

In a message dated 27/02/01 20:51:48 GMT Standard Time,
glengordon01@... writes:

> Hi, everyone! I'm back. Miss me? (boo, hiss, boo) I had midterms.

...

> Let me explain. Pat assumes monogenesis. There is nothing wrong with this
> idea because assuming ONE origin to language is simpler and more
> Occam-compliant than assuming more than one origin. However, Pat then
> quickly goes too far, in the lunatic style that only he can deliver. He
> comes to the amazing revelation that the original language must have been
> perfectly regular in every way like Esperanto. He doesn't once think that
> maybe this "Proto-World" is not alone but rather the only surviving

language

> amongst many others that may have once existed tens of thousands of years
> ago. He doesn't consider that maybe this Proto-World was as natural, as
> perfectly IRREGULAR and as developed as modern languages now spoken. He
> doesn't once think that sound on its own is abstract by nature, void of

any

> meaning, thereby providing any rational thinking person with the

paradoxical

> question: "... But, Pat? Where did your Proto-World come from in the first
> place?" Time for a logic pill, folks!

Welcome back, Glen.

I'm not here to defend Pat, because he can do that perfectly well
himself. I don't agree with Proto-World or the inevitability of
monogenesis either. But I don't think ad-hominems help. Pat's theories
are better argued than some Nostraticist offerings. Surely it is by
debating the validity or otherwise of specific proposed isoglosses and
sound shifts etc. that we get closer to understanding what really
happened?

On a technical point: Esperanto is not perfectly regular in every way.
As the only planned language used by an appreciable speech community,
it has acquired a fair number of idiosyncrasies over the years, and
even the original 1887 specification was not totally lacking in these
either.

Ed. Robertson