A great spoof of creationism in linguistics: Babelism
Brave new language (published by http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1999/future/) quoting from Eduard Hovy, the so-called linguistics expert. May we live and learn that...
"...how computers will help tear down the Tower of Babel that still divides much of mankind."
"The very latest thing was done over the summer. People [built] a system to learn Chinese-to-English translations in 24 hours. That's never been done. When you put in an arbitrary Chinese sentence, the output is fairly crude -- only about half the time it's correct. But it's never been done this quickly!"
"...as languages get older, they become more complex and more varied."
(Eduard Hovy is the director of the Natural Language Group at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California)
From the announcement for the Conference to be held on September 4, 2000 at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in association with the Language Origins Society year 2000 meeting (courtesy of David Pesetsky)
The main obstacle that we have today
to clearly understanding the nature and origins of language is
the overly formalistic, anti-empirical, anti-historical influence
of Chomsky's paradigm for doing linguistics.
It has become very clear in recent years
that Chomsky's generative calculus model of linguistics has no
relevance at all to anything about actual language. It has
also become clear that the main generative notion of the
innateness of language is based on flimsy, non-existent evidence.
Despite this, and despite the fact that
many people in many different fields are now actually studying
real language in realisitic, empirical ways, and despite the fact
that many people intuitively understand the emptiness of
generative claims and practices, it still remains true, that to
the world at large, Chomsky's theories are somehow considered an
important "scientific breakthrough."
So, the time has come that those of us
who want to start a new paradigm for language studies, who want
to begin an empirical way of studying real language, should
simply explain why the entire Chomskyan method must be thrown
away.
I must add that I tried to check on some references cited in these articles
Conclusion: there's still a lot of work for us to do!