As you saw in a previous article, the Chinese government, against all reason and for purely dishonest political motives, lies and says there is only one Chinese language, when in fact linguistic science (SIL) says there are 14 Chinese languages, and Sinologists argue that there are 2,000 Chinese languages!
Linguists let this slide because we have decided to cop out on one of the more important questions of our field, the divide between a language and a dialect. We are copping out because the scientific question itself is politicized as many scientific questions are. But linguists are cowards who are afraid of big, bad politics, so we have decided to just let politicians and other professional liars decide some of the more important questions of our field.
Dig this.
If you ask a linguist what the difference between a dialect and a language is, he will either quote some flippant classroom quote from Paul Weyrich 70 years ago, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy,” or he will avoid the question altogether. The standard linguistic cop-out answer is,
Linguistic science has no way to determine what is a language what is a dialect because the question is political and not scientific.
Brilliant! Any time there’s any questions in your scientific field that you don’t want to answer because you’re cowards/sophists, you simply decide that it wasn’t a scientific question at all, instead it was a political question. Wa-la! Problem solved! Now we can get back to the really important stuff, like figuring how many Proto-Indo-European laryngeals there. You know, stuff that everybody needs to know.
But hey, what the Chinese government lies, I mean says, goes, and all of us linguistic “scientists” (snicker) go along with this anti-scientific BS because we have decided that this particular branch of so-called science is so stupid that we can’t even figure out if a given lect is a language or a dialect because we idiotically state that there are no criteria for making such a discernment.
So of course, we throw the scientific question over to the most honest people in the whole world, the politicians! Yeah! That’ll solve the problem. How bout all of us social “scientists” get together and decide to let the world’s politicians (venerable empiricists of course) decide the most important questions of our field because we are too stupid to figure them out on our own. Let’s get the scientists out of science and let the politicians do it instead. That’s what the official determination of linguistic “science” (snicker) is.
Pitiful. Just pitiful.
You wonder why people chuckle when you say the phrase “social science.”
