Jens:
>You don't know how frequent the *z...
Ach. How many times are you going to wave everything away with
"We don't know this and we don't know that therefore I have
license to propose anything I want and everyone else can stuff it."
This is blatant proof that you don't comprehend Occam's Razor.
Jens:
>This boils down to the question what is evidence and what is not.
Occam's Razor already answers this question for us, so it's not rocket
science. The most likely and most efficient solution wins out. Duh.
If one theory has a bunch of unlikely probabilities strewn together and
another combines the _likeliest_ most "boring" possibilities, we opt
for the latter. If we have two likely candidates for a theory but one
has ten assumptions and the other has only three, we go for the one
with only three. We determine what is likely and what isn't based on
evidence at hand. Frequencies in world languages are most helpful.
This is why your theory lacks credibility. It uses the more unlikely
possibilities (three-way length contrast, a rare phoneme in common
affixes, etc). Sure, these things exist in _some_ languages but we
could probably find a language somewhere to support anything.
Sure, we "don't know" ANYTHING if you want to resort to that kind
of cheap pseudo-validation for your theories, but we equally don't
know whether any of your million-and-one assumptions are true... so
let's just not assume them at all! Let's just ignore you and continue
on with our lives in logical harmony.
If you can't comply with Occam's Razor, there's something
fundamentally wrong with your brain. There's nothing in Occam's
principle that states "we don't know anything so..." That must be the
"Ignorance Razor" that you're using. You must have terrible skin rash.
- gLeN
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