Populations and Excavations; Strata and Data: A linguist Muses upon Anthropology and Archaeology Volume 1 - Issue 4

Tully J Thibeau*

• University of Montana, Missoula, USA

Received: February 08, 2020   Published: February 25, 2020

Corresponding author: Tully J Thibeau, University of Montana, Missoula, USA

 

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Abstract

This paper discusses a small but significant bond that Anthropology and Archaeology share with Linguistics. The discussion is organized around the notion that Anthropology defines human languages as synchronic (i.e., together-time) in opposition to Archaeology, which defines them as diachronic (i.e., across-time). Regarding a Linguistic definition, my discussion of it considers them a matter of optimal design (ekchronic, or outside-time), and, as a result, thinks of them neither communicatively, in terms of ethnography of speaking, nor philologically, in terms of writings of antiquity. However, the modern definition of a science of human languages requires that they be treated as quantities that are calibrated in order to become metricizeable (i.e., not merely so many bits and pieces that materialize). Admittedly, they look that way, but the difference is what appears within chance and beyond it, more like a conceptual metaphor of material culture from statistics [1]. I mainly resolve that labeling linguistic material in this style fails to explain human languages in personal interaction or cognition; they alone have ‘structure’ in an arithmetic construal, but the extent to which human languages interface with either spoken or written words cannot be (very easily, if at all) fathomed intra-disciplinarily.

Abstract| Revealing More About Language, or What You See is Not What You Get| A Brief Post-Structural Interlude| Specifications for a ‘Linguistic’ Economy| Outlining Rules Through a Ranking Thereof| Overt Identicalness vs. Covert Difference| Brief Closing Remarks| References|