Category talk:HYPO

What is HYPO? I'm not confident with using too many similar 4-letter abbreviations in the names of categories in Glottopedia. In Linguipedia we hat "Bibliographical reference" instead of "BIB" (in Glottopedia). That was ok, everyone knew what it stands for. But now here in Glottopedia we have LING, LANG, ... and so on. What are HYPO and LIRE, anyway... ? --Sven Siegmund 20:41, 10 July 2007 (CEST)

The idea is that the article types (i.e. the major classes of articles, which all have rather different properties) are described by abbreviated categories, somewhat like the article languages, which also have abbreviated category names (En, De, etc.). LIRE and LING are identical -- the former should be changed to the latter. HYPO has now been explained. --Haspelmath 22:08, 11 July 2007 (CEST)

Ok, LIRE obviously means linguistic research. Not bad. I suggested somwhere that we rename LING into RESEARCH --Sven Siegmund 11:48, 12 July 2007 (CEST)

meaning of or association with "HYPO"

I am quite unhappy with such a category in general and with HYPO in particular.

In general: categories should be introduced in a systematic way, similar to a thesaurus structure or according to another scheme where the individual categories together cover a specific part of the conceptual space. Currently, Glottopedia categories 'grow' according to individual needs without enough looking at a general system. This could result, sooner or later, in a breakdown.

In particular because "HYPO" suggests 'hypothesis' as meaning. However, the examples which can be found under this category have nothing in common with hypotheses. These would belong rather into a category such as "approaches and formalisms". (Remember: A hypothesis is a scientific assumption which meets a number of well-defined semantic and syntactic conditions of well-formedness and well-formulatedness and guarantees that its truth value can be tested (falsified) with empirical means.) With respect to what I formulated above, the introduction of a category "hypothesis" (if this is really intented) would call for a number of other categories such as "scientific problem", "theory", "explanation", "test method" ... I am pretty susre that most linguists would fail to correctly attribute these categories. On the basis of my experience, only a very small number of linguists have some knowledge of the basics of the philosophy of science. Example: Not a single case of the application of the term "theory" in mainstream linguistics and other subdisciplines is correct. Instead, any idea, definition, concept, approach etc. is called a "theory". The same is likely to happen with hypothesis.

As a consequence, Glottopedia comes into danger to support conceptual confusion instead of contributing to information and clarification. I plead for a very thoughtful and resonsible category policy, at least as long as scientific content is concerned. --Rk 17:57, 12 July 2007 (CEST)