Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

[Thry]

Just that. This blunder doesn't get more than about 50 millinylands.

It was enough to devoid* me of all my willingness to talk to him xD

*I was looking for another verb "_ someone of something" (to take it out of them). Have any of you seen it around?

[masako]

All writing systems date back to an international guild of smiths in the Ancient Near East.

Wait. What?

Kharosthi is from the 2nd millennium BCE?! That's like a 1700 year mistake? That's baffling.

[Mr. Z]

You will have to explain your millinylands system to me some day, you know.

It is simple. A nyland is a unit of measurement for linguistic quackery. The standard is Edo Nyland, a crackpot who claimed that all languages were conlangs made by Basque monks or something like that. That is 1 nyland. Or 1000 millinylands. As few people ever get close to the quackery of Edo Nyland, most linguistic quackeries are in a range of a few millinylands to a few hundred millinylands.

Oh, it's a milli-nyland... I thought it was something like a milliny-land, and then it doesn't make any sense. Now I remember the last time you explained it.

[Morrígan]

I have this feeling that the Nyland scale should be based in some way on the log-likelihood of the proposed hypothesis. One way we might start is my quantifying the probability of coincidental similarities between languages.

[Vuvuzela]

Q= Quackery Quotient
C= probability of however many resemblances the would-be linguist identifies or greater occurring by chance, if applicable. Stands for "Chance".
O=Number of possible alterations to the theory that would make it simpler while no less adequately explaining the evidence. Stands for "Occam's razor"
M= The number of times the comparative method is applied in a logical manner. Stands for "method"
L= Number of characters in the corpus. Stands for "Length"
I know there are probably other variables, and they might be weighted differently, but perhaps some equation akin to
Q=(CO-M)/L
Would do nicely.

[Wattmann]

But what is the measure of logic, then?

[vampireshark]

Just that. This blunder doesn't get more than about 50 millinylands.

It was enough to devoid* me of all my willingness to talk to him xD

*I was looking for another verb "_ someone of something" (to take it out of them). Have any of you seen it around?

Drain, perhaps?


Fortunately, as I'm a science person, I haven't seen too many instances of idiocy as of late. I should look more carefully, though.

[Whimemsz]

deprive? divest?

[Thry]

deprive?

gotcha

Here's your cookie phoneme: /k/

[Thry]

Fortunately, as I'm a science person, I haven't seen too many instances of idiocy as of late. I should look more carefully, though.

I'm sure there's enough idiocy for every field.

[communistplot]

So apparently there are no American English dialects and all differences are slang, being told that brought me out of the best alcohol induced mood I'd ever been in.

[Pinetree]

So apparently there are no American English dialects and all differences are slang, being told that brought me out of the best alcohol induced mood I'd ever been in.

Who told you that?

[Vuvuzela]

So apparently there are no American English dialects and all differences are slang, being told that brought me out of the best alcohol induced mood I'd ever been in.

A've never heard in ma ho laf thayut the ayukseyunt of the Amer'can Sayouth was just slang.

[communistplot]

So apparently there are no American English dialects and all differences are slang, being told that brought me out of the best alcohol induced mood I'd ever been in.

Who told you that?

A guy I work with, he does freelance journalism for NPR as his day job apparently, he tried to use that against me in his argument, y'know journalist vs. linguistics major-future dialectologist, this makes sense.

[Vuvuzela]

A guy I work with, he does freelance journalism for NPR as his day job apparently, he tried to use that against me in his argument, y'know journalist vs. linguistics major-future dialectologist, this makes sense.

In what context does that support any argument?

[communistplot]

That's exactly the thing, he claimed to know more about the English language than me because of his journalism credentials, which makes no sense in an argument at all, I could see if he argued he'd studied under Labov or Crystal, and even then his ideas are just stupid, but journalist? Really?

[Pthagnar]

journalism is the best job for people who, when they learn P, their immediate reflex is to make fun of everyone else for not knowing P

[Vuvuzela]

That's exactly the thing, he claimed to know more about the English language than me because of his journalism credentials, which makes no sense in an argument at all, I could see if he argued he'd studied under Labov or Crystal, and even then his ideas are just stupid, but journalist? Really?

Quickly! Regurgitating random facts contest!
"Catalan is a dialect of Spanish!"
"Unlike Spanish, English doesn't even have dialects!"
"Oh, yeah, well that's because it was made up by Basque monks!"
"I thought it descended from mixing Latin and French."
"That's what the Monks want you to think!"
"Wait, isn't Basque just a dialect of Spanish?"
"No, Portuguese."
"What about Japanese?"
"No, you're thinking of Finnish."
"I thought that was a dialect of Swedish."
"They all come from Sanskrit."
"Including Romani?"
"No, that's just the purest form of Latin"

[communistplot]

That's exactly the thing, he claimed to know more about the English language than me because of his journalism credentials, which makes no sense in an argument at all, I could see if he argued he'd studied under Labov or Crystal, and even then his ideas are just stupid, but journalist? Really?

Quickly! Regurgitating random facts contest!
"Catalan is a dialect of Spanish!"
"Unlike Spanish, English doesn't even have dialects!"
"Oh, yeah, well that's because it was made up by Basque monks!"
"I thought it descended from mixing Latin and French."
"That's what the Monks want you to think!"
"Wait, isn't Basque just a dialect of Spanish?"
"No, Portuguese."
"What about Japanese?"
"No, you're thinking of Finnish."
"I thought that was a dialect of Swedish."
"They all come from Sanskrit."
"Including Romani?"
"No, that's just the purest form of Latin"

lulzwut, of course all of that came from Sanskrit though, don'tcha know?

[Thry]

"That's what the Monks want you to think!"

[Vuvuzela]

"That's what the Monks want you to think!"

[Pinetree]

"That's what the Monks want you to think!"

[Bob Johnson]

"That's what the Monks want you to think!"

[clawgrip]

Maybe I'm missing something here, but why would you stress "the"? The only reason I can think of for doing that is if you were correcting someone who had said, "That's what a monks want you to think!"

[Pinetree]

Maybe I'm missing something here, but why would you stress "the"? The only reason I can think of for doing that is if you were correcting someone who had said, "That's what a monks want you to think!"

well, if the speaker wanted to assert that there was only one group of monks worth talking about, he might stress the article.