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From: goldberg@SU-Russell.ARPA (Jeffrey Goldberg)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Easy languages (Universal Base Hypothesis)
Message-ID: <222@SU-Russell.ARPA>
Date: Sun, 16-Feb-86 22:43:32 EST
Article-I.D.: SU-Russe.222
Posted: Sun Feb 16 22:43:32 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 18-Feb-86 04:25:17 EST
References: <77@druhi.UUCP> <3550004@csd2.UUCP> <402@watmum.UUCP> <632@scc.UUCP>
Reply-To: goldberg@SU-Russell.UUCP (Jeffrey Goldberg)
Organization: Center for Study of Language and Information, Stanford
Lines: 66

In article <632@scc.UUCP> steiny@scc.UUCP (Don Steiny) writes:

>	I hope that this nonsense does not continue to propogate.
>The original posting was a joke about transformational grammar and
>the author stated that it was a joke in the posting.  Someone took
>him seriously and now more people are.    
>
>	The original posting joked that all languages were derived
>from English because Noam Chomsky did his original work on TG on
>English and postualted a structure (S => NP VP) for all languages.
>Some papers (Pullum) have shown that this is not universal.   The
>author of the original posting is a competent linguist and was 
>commenting on chauvinism, not suggesting that all languages
>were derived from English.
>
>-- 
>scc!steiny
>Don Steiny @ Don Steiny Software 
>109 Torrey Pine Terrace
>Santa Cruz, Calif. 95060
>(408) 425-0382

There was a later posting that didn't look like a joke.

Anyway, it is is clear that the "Universal Base Hypothesis" has been
rejected as either silly or having no consequence (utterly
unfalsifyable), and while this is the opinion that is expressed by
Pullum he is not to be given the credit for showing the problems with
the UBH.  Peters and Rithie (1969) ["A note on the UBH" J of Ling, 5]
should be given the credit.  Notice that 1969 was a long time ago, and
generative linguistics may have grown up a little bit since then.
Nonetheless, there is a joke.

For the sake of the joke please assume that 1 is a prime number.

A man who is ignorent of such things has heard the conjecture that all
odd numbers are prime.  He goes and asks a mathematician if this is
true.  To which she responds, "Well, one is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is
prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not prime.  The conjecture is proved false by
counterexample."  

Our hero isn't satisfied because he knows that mathematicians have
their heads in the clouds and aren't tied down to reality.  So he asks
the physical chemist who has to actually do lots of calculations.  The
chemist says, "One is prime, three is prime, five is prime, seven is
prime, nine is uh not prime, eleven is prime, thirteen is prime.  Yes,
they are all prime.  We just have some experimental error."

[The joke has an engineer and a computer programmer part, but it is too
long so I will get on with the point.]

Finally, after getting conflicting and inconclusive results from all
of the above he goes to the genertive linguist.  (He has learned that
they get pretty mathematical at times.  After all, they use lots of
alphas and betas, and they don't know Greek.)  So he says to the
linguist, "I have heard that all odd numbers are prime.  Is this true?"
The linguist thinks for a moment and says, "Well, one is prime.  Yes,
it must be a universal!"

I would have posted this to net.jokes, but I don't think that it would
have been sufficiently appreciated.

-- 
/* 
**  Jeff Goldberg (best reached at GOLDBERG@SU-CSLI.ARPA)
*/