Contents › Section 7: Theory, terminology and disciplinary question › answer 32 of 39
Which famous linguists embrace historical logic to understand language?
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You (and the source) are confusing the technical and colloquial sense of the word logic here.
When you say There's a certain logic to language. or Even language is logical. you're saying something like, The way language works make sense. But this is radically different from saying, Language can be described using the apparatus of formal logic.
Most linguists will agree with the former but many fewer will agree with the latter.
No historical linguist believes that historical changes can be described by logical formalisms but many of them believe (particularly in the past) that it is governed by laws similar to those of physics. For instance, Grimm's Law. Today, most historical linguists will talk about tendencies or regularities but no one believes that even sound change laws are a given in the same way that the laws of physics are.
William Labov gave a great overview of the history and present of the thinking on language change in the first chapter of Vol 1 of his Principles of Linguistic change.
© Dominik Lukeš. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Originally published on Linguistics Stack Exchange, attributed there to Dominik Lukes (profile).