analogies

So I have been "away" in many ways, but I promise to get back to regular postings from now on. Let's start with some very nice analogies.

A fairly-long thread on the Corpora list which started with someone asking about the origin of a particular analogy ended up with some very good examples:

• an analogy comparing the advent of corpora in linguistic studies to the advent of telescopes to sailors (attributed either to Michael Stubbs, John Sinclair, or Geoffrey Leech).
• an analogy comparing the difference between lexis and grammar to the difference between particles and waves (looking at language / light from different points of view).
• an analogy comparing the climate, i.e. the long-term, stable, slowly-evolving language system, to the weather, which includes all the local instances of language features (attributed to Micheal Halliday).

In this discussion, two very interesting (and old) references were mentioned, which I would like to read one day:

Cherry, Colin. (1956). On Human Communication. This book introduces the idea of "quantization" in human language (e.g. expressing the conept of size, the process of transcribing sounds into strings of alphabetic characters)

Pike, Kenneth. (1959). "Language as Particle, Wave, and Field." In The Texas Quarterly 2:2.

They sound pretty scientific, don't they? Well, language, science, music, love.. they all have one thing in common: no matter how much you analyse it, there will always be something you don't quite understand :)

Mai