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Discovering these rules and their exceptions have been what field linguists, and philologists before them like Champollion (who should be more widely known imo -- he was actually doing science to decipher hieroglyphics; a generation or two before, decipherments were largely alchemistic gobbledygook) as well and the westerners and Indians who worked on the old languages India had been doing for well over a hundred years. These field linguists (Imperialistic Europeans, those under the colonial yoke, and disinterested, merely inquisitive parties) produced grammars noting rules, which really do outnumber the exceptions in any given dialect at a given time (that's important), and exceptions. This work has led to everything from a tighter grasp on colonial possessions, to the enhanced ability of colonized to resist their colonizers, to the decipherment of forgotten, thousand year-old and the recording of near-dead languages. And regarding your last comment, in many cases the languages we're dealing with have no writing, so I do agree. A better Olympiad would have at least included a aural-only portion of the exam. I right there with you on this one. Really, maybe we're agreeing more than disagreeing, because I also support your comment that "expecting linguistics to work like mathematics seems unnecessarily limiting". Mathematics doesn't change; no same person steps in the same linguistic twice. That was the base of the linguistic program for most of the 2nd half of the 20th century (this was also computational linguistics before it took it's rule-based
-to-statistical turn), and it produced insights and tools for the field linguists, mainly to decipher morphosyntax. Yet, I'd say the BIG discoveries, like the decipherment of Maya, have come from that muddy, uncomfortable, dangerous field work... gathering evidence for regularities among the glyphs that could be painstakingly comparing those amongst themselves and with the spoken languages of the region today. Some rules have stayed very similar for a long time, and I invite you to look at the historical recreations of proto-languages to get a sense of not only the regularities of a given modern language, but the regularities in the changes of languages over >1000 years. That being said, (statistics-borne) Computational Linguistics is a wonderful (and a little scary thing), and I'm very willing to change my mind. It certainly challenges the rule-based assumptions and just maybe we're headed towards another paradigm shift. |
Sign languages are different--there isn't really an IPA-like system for previously unwritten sign languages.