Re: Ban all non academic discussions

On 2008-04-20 23:02, mkelkar2003 wrote:

> There is nothing particulary scientific about linguistic methods of
> dating either. See the paper below:
>
> McMahon, A. and McMahon, R. (2006) Why Lingustics Don't Do Dates:
> Evidence from Indo-European and Australian Languages. In Peter Forster
> and Colin Renfrew, editors, Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of
> Languages, pages 153--.
>
> http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/mcMahon06phylogeneticMethods.html

Linguistics doesn't offer any way of absolute dating (we "don't do
dates", as the McMahons put it). We are pretty good, however, at
_relative_ dating, and since some (even if few) linguistic events can be
dated with using extralinguistic evidence (documentary, archaeological,
etc.), we can constrain our relative chronologies to some extent.

Anyway, whatever the difficulties of linguistic dating, your "tu quoque"
argument is fallacious, therefore irrelevant.

Piotr