06-01-2007, 02:01 PM
Please emphasise this boldly
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->I think the field of linguistics is itself a political tool that certain people will (and do) find useful to rewrite history with. But we don't want politics, we want facts.
Not even sure that linguistics can ever be used for unmotivated scholarship, I think it is such a loose methodology - when there's no large body of historic data to keep speculations bounded - that one can use it to find/create support for many points of view. That's not what we're looking for: not just any means to an end.
Until we get more information, people should be willing to say that they simply don't know either what happened or how things happened. And also admit we may never know (which is more difficult and certainly more annoying). IE linguists and indologicals won't admit these things of course, because it concerns the very field they're in.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->I think the field of linguistics is itself a political tool that certain people will (and do) find useful to rewrite history with. But we don't want politics, we want facts.
Not even sure that linguistics can ever be used for unmotivated scholarship, I think it is such a loose methodology - when there's no large body of historic data to keep speculations bounded - that one can use it to find/create support for many points of view. That's not what we're looking for: not just any means to an end.
Until we get more information, people should be willing to say that they simply don't know either what happened or how things happened. And also admit we may never know (which is more difficult and certainly more annoying). IE linguists and indologicals won't admit these things of course, because it concerns the very field they're in.
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