Hi all
djr33, freknu, lx keep repeating this:
We've told you that we don't believe you, that your arguments are not convincing, that your methodology is flawed, and that your theories are almost certainly incorrect.
This has been stated again and again without any counter argument.
Then Lx said this yesterday:
I'm happy to believe you think you've got the answer. Send your hypotheses to some linguistics journals. Let us know what they say. Failing that, try sending the idea to one credible linguist and promise to quote the honest response he/she gives you.
And djr33 then agreed and added:
What lx was trying to say is: can you find even one credible person (here or elsewhere) who agrees with you? Having an unpopular opinion is fine. Having a theory that absolutely no one believes is probably a sign that something is off.
Again and again you use word believe in. This is what I have been saying from the beginning. You are not scientists, you are teachers, whose only argument is belief in what they learned at school.
And now you have proven that you actually have no thoughts of your own what so ever, and that all you know is to fallow the opinions of credible linguists. What would happen if Chomsky or some other "credible linguist" accepted my theory? Would you then change your "beliefs" and start believing in my theory? Just like that? Is this the extent of your scientific methods?
You are the exact opposite from what scientist should be.
Considering that none of you have distanced yourself from what lx and djr33 have said, I can only conclude that you are all believers and not scientists.
Jkpate
You say you've been relying on your intuitions about language
This is not what I said. I said that I noticed the consistent appearance of certain sounds in certain types of words with related meaning. I noticed that while analyzing Serbian and Irish. I was using long term stable languages which are distant geographically and historically.
I deliberately avoided English because it is a mixed language which underwent huge changes in last 1000 years.
the probability of never repeating a sound is actually zero
This is off course true and obvious. But we are not talking about picking endless number of random groups of sounds out of 30 sounds. There is no endless number of words. Also we are talking about only words with particular meaning. So the number of repetitions of the experiment is even smaller.
There are only 284 different word roots in English language starting with N. I extracted the information from the freely available spell checker software world lists.
If say 200 of them are related to boundary, what is the probability that that was an a coincidence, meaning collection of random sound picks which all ended up in making words which start with N and have meaning related to boundary?
I think you are asking wrong questions.
Now, this is assuming that all of the words you know are related to "boundary," but, given your flexibility in saying words are related, a few hundred examples are not at all surprising or convincing that your correspondence between particular sounds and particular meanings is real. Simply looking at more words will not be convincing, because the number of opportunities for coincidences rises as you look for words.
What you are saying here basically is that even if statistics prove that I am right, you will not accept the results? What is the point of doing all this statistics stuff then? It is only useful if it proves you right and me wrong? What kind of science is this?
I have repeatedly said that I mean when I say boundary related. I explained it not once in detail. I gave you the algorithm to select boundary related words. But you are refusing to accept any of this, because you want to use "my flexibility in saying words are related to boundary" as a wriggle out route in case, as you have seen yourself, statistics proves me right.
But this is not surprising because I deal with believers not scientists. You might fancy yourselves as scientists, you might think that because you use statistics that that makes you a scientist. But your could not be further from being scientists.
Use one of the examples that I have given you, and explain what you see using any other existing theory that you believe in. If the only counter theory that you can come up with is coincidence, they you are the same as people who explain the universe by saying that it was god's will.
I thought that at least in our ability to think, premeditate and act based on our thoughts made us independent from destiny of randomness by god's will, but you obviously don't think so.
jkpate you said:
Methodologies do exist for addressing this: you could randomly sample words related to boundary by asking people with a survey, like djr33 has suggested, or use a corpus that is representative of languages, like I did.
First there is nothing random about asking people what words relate to boundary. You are talking about people who have their cognitive processes shaped by their common cultural experience. So their answers are not random, they are the opposite from random. You don't understand this because you don't understand how our brains are shaped by our experiences and particularly by our language. The survey has the same randomness coefficient as asking people who all support Man United to give you the list of best football players.
Of course you can't ask Turkish people to tell you what English words are related to boundary. And this makes the whole argument about random sampling of words through surveys useless.
You could do what I suggested:
Use sound blocks I already used in my analysis. Find 100 random words from this thread, or any random page on the internet, which are built around these sound blocks. Find root words using etymological dictionary. Give the list of modern words and root words to someone with the list of sound blocks and their meanings. See if sum meaning of the original words is close to the meaning of the original word and of the modern word.
You can do this with a computer, you don't need people. But you need to understand what boundary actually is first. I explained that many times, gave you definition from dictionaries, so I will not repeat it again.
As for your wordnet software, It is based on word synonyms and what I am talking about is based on sound block synonyms. So I can't use it. But thanks for your help, at least you tried.
Here is an example of what I am talking about: in (inside something), on (on something), no (negation of something), un (opposite of something) are all sound blocks which express boundary meaning. If you find them in any word, that word is a boundary word.
And by the way I will contact few reputable and respectable linguists. And let's see what happen. Maybe djr33 will start believing in me and my gospel one day...
