uoaei
Joined 9 years ago
Joined 9 years ago
Assuming it's definitely matter, and operating on that basis for nearly 50 years, is not good science, period.
Power determines rationalization. Justification is a moral question.
What have they done to show they can be trusted?
Reading this meter you linked from AllSides, it appears that the main purpose of that meter is to enforce the boundaries of the Overton window using faux-objectivity as a cover.
Example: Schwabisch is wild and would be phonetically transcribed very differently from Hochdeutsch which is its ostensible language progenitor (technically more a cousin than an ancestor in the lineage of language evolution), but if the goal is merely to focus the model purely on phonetic transcription then you can add additional post-processing layers which map sounds to core concepts shared across dialects for actual translation. But I like your idea of interacting with the intermediate elements to familiarize yourself at least with the phonetic patterns, we humans are still thinkers enough to infer patterns of grammar and semantics from these building blocks just as we have done for the entire history of the species/lineage before written representations of language came along (relatively late -- evidence of script cropped up only once civilization had centralized to a sufficient degree to make economics non-local and non-trivial).
tl;dr the big words: it's not til you collect enough spoken samples of the dead(ish/dying) language being spoken that the local idiosyncracies are discovered, luckily linguists are smart enough to probably anticipate and certainly post-process language snippets to grasp the common structures for this or that given language.