Well said Miland, about the need for theories of language to encompass Esperanto, if they are going to be scientific.

Even if the term lingvoscienco is occasionally used, I still don't see much evidence of the scientific method in linguistics.

sudanglo: I still don't see much evidence of the scientific method in linguistics.

Are you trolling? Every single field uses the scientific method.

As put by Wikipedia:
Define the question
Gather information and resources (observe)
Form hypothesis
Perform experiment and collect data
Analyze data
Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis
Publish results
Retest (frequently done by other scientists)

sudanglo:Well said Miland, about the need for theories of language to encompass Esperanto, if they are going to be scientific.

Even if the term lingvoscienco is occasionally used, I still don't see much evidence of the scientific method in linguistics.

To see the evidence, you'd need to actually learn something about linguistics. There are various things that make an area of study a science. One of them is the creation of hypotheses falsifiable by empirical observation. Language is behavior, and behavior is observable. Linguists do generate falsifiable hypotheses and test them, all the time.

I agree that Esperanto is a worthy object of study for linguists, and indeed some linguists have studied it. I think it's a bit much, however, to say that all generalizations about languages must apply to Esperanto. To use an analogy I've used before: There are scientists who study rivers. They're called potamologists. To insist that any and all generalizations they might have about the formation and behavior of rivers should also apply to canals is just, well, wrong. But certainly, some things that are true of rivers are also true of canals.

Esperanto really is different from other languages, in that it is not defined by the norms of an L1 speech community. That's not a small difference; it's huge. Many of the things that linguists are interested are connected to the fact that natural languages are continuously normed by L1 communities, so it's not a shock that Esperanto is less interesting from this perspective. But not everything of interest to linguists depends upon the norms of the L1 community, so Esperanto isn't, or shouldn't be, devoid of interest. After all, L2 acquisition is also an active area of research in linguistics.

I must half-disagree with the last point of yours Miland - but of course it depends on the goal of a study. If it's to find out if every language must have the vowel sound /æioyy/, then of course to make that claim one must check if that is a requirement of every language, EO included. On the other hand, if one meant living languages as in the common languages of today and not ones from ages ago, perhaps to make a distinction involving the evolution of languages, Esperanto isn't really needed in such a study. It just depends on what the goal of a researcher is.

And to be honest, we've mentioned often on these boards that Esperanto shouldn't be left out of any linguistics investigation, and while I can only speak from a recent understanding of linguistics and don't know if Esperanto was left out in the past, nowadays linguists seem to be very inclusive of esperanto when it is relevant and don't seem to hold biases. Perhaps that is because nowadays computers are at a level where we can simply plug in data about a language rather than having to have deep understanding of various languages, which may have put off linguists of the past who didn't want to bother learning Esperanto.

(EDIT: heck, T0dd wrote it better than me - I might also add that Esperanto is a very stock standard language, and nothing remarkably special, so often you wouldn't need to check if Esperanto does something because it's not a terribly creative piece of work, more inspired. Even the verb system, to me at least, seems similar to the classical thematic vowel system).

(RE semantics, we've been talking about linguistics and linguists in that field, but I guess it adds to the confusion that a linguist can also be simply someone who's fond of languages, which we wouldn't want to confuse with the more scientific type of linguist )

T0dd: potamologists

Hippopotamologist = someone who studies hippopotami or someone who studies horses in rivers or a really big potamologist?

You, Ceigered, are truly twisted . Thanks for the laugh today!

T0dd skribis:

potamologists

Hippopotamologist = someone who studies hippopotami or someone who studies horses in rivers or a really big potamologist?

Linguists do generate falsifiable hypotheses and test them, all the time.

If they do, they are keeping it remarkably well hidden, unlike physicists.

Incidentally I am inclined to agree that Esperanto is different from other languages.

But it would be a very strange thing (not impossible, of course) if it turned out that when Esperantists speak Esperanto they are using entirely different neural structures to when they speak national languages, be they L1's or L2's.

So if you have a theory of language, it should embrace Esperanto.

The river/canal analogy is specious because all languages are in some sense man-made.

L1's are not biological phenomena, or phenomena of the natural world.

sudanglo:

Linguists do generate falsifiable hypotheses and test them, all the time.

If they do, they are keeping it remarkably well hidden, unlike physicists.

Really? So, the linguistics journals you've looked at have to be held over a candle before you can read them?

Nothing's hidden. It's out there; you just have to take the time to inform yourself before reaching conclusions.

Incidentally I am inclined to agree that Esperanto is different from other languages.

But it would be a very strange thing (not impossible, of course) if it turned out that when Esperantists speak Esperanto they are using entirely different neural structures to when they speak national languages, be they L1's or L2's.

Then why is it that there are brain lesions that cause aphasias that impair L1 function but leave L2 function relatively intact, and vice versa? Perhaps neurolinguistics is hidden too, so you haven't heard of it.

Be that as it may, the discovery of the neural underpinnings of language is hardly the only issue that linguists are concerned with. Language itself, and particular languages, are perfectly appropriate objects of scientific study.

So if you have a theory of language, it should embrace Esperanto.

What do you even mean by a "theory of language"?

The river/canal analogy is specious because all languages are in some sense man-made.

L1's are not biological phenomena, or phenomena of the natural world.

The analogy is not specious. All languages are "in some sense" man-made, but in another sense they are not. They are not the result of conscious design decisions, with the exception of constructed languages such as Esperanto and, to a lesser extent, reconstructed languages such as modern Hebrew.

Designed things, such as planned languages, canals, and gardens, have properties that undesigned things are not expected to have. Undesigned things are not limited to the biological/natural world.

We are biologically endowed with the ability to learn and use language. The languages that we use have their own formal properties that were not decided on by anybody. Understanding those properties is one of the things that linguists are very interested in, but not the only thing.

How do languages get to be the way they are? That's a legitimate scientific question. It should be obvious that the kind of answer appropriate to French, German, and Lithuanian is rather different from the answer appropriate to Esperanto.

I wouldn't doubt that neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics are sciences. In those fields they do proper experiments.

The L1/L2 specific aphasia is interesting if true, but storage in a different location in the brain does not mean the mechanism is different.

I believe the issue as to whether we humans have a Darwinian evolved language faculty - so all speakable languages must be congruent with this faculty - is an undecided issue.

Let's distinguish between linguists and linguistic-icians. I have no problem with linguists who document the features of a specific language or family of related languages.

My beef is with lingvistikistoj who want to draw general conclusions about human language - laws of linguistics if you like - based on studies which do not address Esperanto.

To me lingustics looks like anthropology, or the study of different games in different cultures, with the attendant problems of drawing general conclusions.

By the way I think I have solved the problem of Kiel oni pruvas ke matenmanĝi estas ne-transitiva (see Esperanto thread)

sudanglo:I wouldn't doubt that neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics are sciences. In those fields they do proper experiments.

As they do in other branches of linguistics. You really need to learn more about the sciences that you are criticizing. For that matter, it would help to learn about the philosophy of science. There are many different kinds of experiments, but what they have in common is the collection of data to confirm and disconfirm hypotheses. Linguists do this. Anthropologists do this too.

In many sciences, such as astrophysics, evolutionary biology, and linguistics, scientists must rely on fairly complex chains of inference to link the observable phenomena to the unobservable phenomena, when the latter are what they are trying to understand. Scientists can't directly observe the insides of stars, the mutations that give rise to species, or the neural structures that support language (in action). For this reason, their conclusions are always highly tentative and subject to massive revision, in the light of new data. And at any given point, the interpretation of the data is itself a matter of dispute. Scientists don't disagree about theories because they have different data. They disagree because they have different ideas about how to interpret the data that they all have.

The L1/L2 specific aphasia is interesting if true, but storage in a different location in the brain does not mean the mechanism is different.

There's a difference between L2s learned before and after puberty. The kinds of errors that one makes in a language learned after puberty are systematically different from the kind one makes in a language learned before puberty. This, again, is a discovery in actual empirical linguistics.

I believe the issue as to whether we humans have a Darwinian evolved language faculty - so all speakable languages must be congruent with this faculty - is an undecided issue.

As you've stated it, it's a mere tautology. A language faculty, after all, is just a faculty to speak languages. To say that all speakable languages must be congruent with this faculty is to say that all speakable languages must be speakable: not really undecided.

Let's distinguish between linguists and linguistic-icians. I have no problem with linguists who document the features of a specific language or family of related languages.

My beef is with lingvistikistoj who want to draw general conclusions about human language - laws of linguistics if you like - based on studies which do not address Esperanto.

Help yourself to the beef. Dine it! But sulking because linguists don't pay as much attention to Esperanto as you'd like doesn't show that they're not scientists.

For those who think that human speak languages through an evolved faculty, the word faculty does not just mean 'an ability to'. It refers to a specialized feature in the brain.