Thursday, May 05, 2005

Prescriptivism, or linguistic creationism

Linguists boycott Kansas intelligent design hearings (Some whimsy from Language Log)
The state board of education in Kansas plans to hold hearings in May on the "intelligent design" theory of the origin of English, which claims that the language was constructed in the early 16th century by a committee of unknown experts guided by a Supreme Grammarian. But professional linguists are mostly boycotting the hearings.

Six years ago, when conservatives previously held a majority of seats on the Kansas board of education, they established guidelines encouraging schools to give equal time to the theory of linguistic creationism, which claims that English was created directly by God five hundred years ago at the start of the Great Vowel Shift so that the King James Bible could be translated into it. But this triggered a backlash, and they lost control of the board, which repealed the guidelines. Now that conservatives are back in a majority position, they are instead promoting the teaching of the intelligent design theory. But linguists are not willing to appear at their scheduled hearings on the subject.
And there's plenty more where that came from, including this kicker:
And one Language Log staff writer who declined to give his name, speaking briefly with a reporter while waiting in line at Language Log Plaza's café, the Latté Linguistica, snapped: "Intelligent design my ass. Have you looked at the lie / lay situation? It's a total disorganized mess. One thing I'm sure of: we're not looking at the product of a perfect mental organ created with the guidance of a higher grammatical power."

3 Comments:

At 9:57 PM, May 05, 2005, Blogger mynym said...

Here is an example of the known frauds taught in schools by evolutionists.

Why would they be reduced to a reliance on frauds? It's because the evidence goes against them.

Language is a good example.

"It is perfectly safe to attribute [innate mental
structures] to 'natural selection', so long as we
realize that there is no substance to this assertion, that it amounts to nothing more than a belief that there is some naturalistic explanation for these phenomena. . . . In the case of such systems as language and wings it is not easy even to imagine a course of selection that might have
given rise to them."
--Noam Chomsky

If you want to believe that the 100 billion neurons that make up the neural nets of the human brain can be traced back to an ancestral puddle of mud, that's fine. A lot of people believe a lot of stupid and ignorant things...but don't pretend that such a mythological narrative of Naturalism has anything to do with science.

 
At 10:10 PM, May 05, 2005, Blogger Nicole said...

I guess this is what I should expect. I forgot how easy it is to troll Technorati for "creationism." Ah, well.

 
At 12:06 AM, May 06, 2005, Blogger tom said...

"Troll" is certainly the appropriate verb. Or noun, in this case.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home