Please could you add me? Thanks!

#linguistics #philology #indo-european

And a raised glass to the enduring memory of the wonderful Anna Morpurgo Davies 🍷

Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo. 2020. The initiation and incrementation of sound change: Community-oriented momentum-sensitive learning. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5(1): 121. 1–32. DOI: doi.org/10.5334/gjgl..., pp. 23-24

'In particular, successful accounts of macroscopic facts typically ignore much of the available information about the corresponding micro-states, precisely because a key measure of their explanatory success is the extent to which they incorporate only causally efficient factors.' (5/5)

'Crucially, the latter shows that the temperature of a gas depends on the speed distribution of its molecules, but not on their positions or directions of travel... Choosing the right idealization is often crucial to making progress towards solving a scientific problem.' (4/5)

'The macroscopic behaviour of gases is described in terms of properties such as temperature, pressure, volume, and amount of substance. Under certain conditions..., the relations between these variables are excellently approximated by the ideal gas law' (3/5)

'It would be wrong, however, to expect that, every time we roll back abstraction and idealization in the study of sound change, we will receive an immediate pay-off in the form of models of greater explanatory power. An example from physics will serve to make this point.' (2/4)

Ah - still great as you say! Like the book 😁