First, Rosenfelder is an amateur himself; not a professional, but a
well-informed amateur with an admirably incisive mind and a talent
for popularising good science -- rare gifts these days.
Secondly, what I will repeat until you understand or I get tired is
that Rosenfelder has no "theory" to sell. He only evaluates claims
based on mere "resemblances" and shows why they must be rejected. If
his model could be used to show that comparative analysis must be
rejected as well, we'd have a reason to worry, but it can't. The
comparative method offers controls that simultaneously minimise the
dangers of accepting bogus positives and of overlooking _real_
positives. Context-free rules, e.g. those that make up Grimm's Law,
produce systematic correspondences just like context-sensitive ones,
so I can't see how the resultant patterns could be rejected by
Rosenfelder or anyone else. The monster he has allegedly created must
be something in your mind.
Piotr
--- In cybalist@..., tgpedersen@... wrote:
In his zeal to create a Medusa's head to scare off abominable
amateurs, Rosenfelder has created a monster that will turn any
language comparison into stone, including IE (that is, excluding
pairs of languages, the path between which consists of context-free
rules only).
And BTW, you may point out for the umpteenth time that no, no,
Rosenfelder shows that you can't use "similarity" in linguistics. But
I agree, he does; unfortunately in the process he has shown
that "proper" linguistics is impossible too. That's why I called for
a modification of his theory.