Re: searching for common words for all today's languages

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "ytielts" <ytielts@...> wrote:

>
> Is there any information available for the
> correspondent sound roots in the superfamily of Eurasian(60,000-40,000
> years ago as proposed by Merritt Ruhlen in 1944), from which some big
> language families such as Afro-Asiatic, Eurasiatic including
> indoeuropean languages and Dene-Caucasian involving Chinese, my first
> language, by the way, are believed to derive by the main stream
> genetists like Cavalli-sforza, Peter Underhill(both are the
> authoritative genetists working with the HGP) and linguists like
> Merritt Ruhlen? Thanks for some reliable referrences.

Ruhlen and Greenberg use the method of "mass comparison" which is a
load of crap. It consists of looking at lists of words from various
languages and picking out lookalikes of vaguely similar meaning. It
has two (well, at least two) fatal flaws. First, there's no mechanism
to distinguish inherited words from borrowings. Second, it's easy to
miss seeing cognate words that don't look alike (like English I and
Latin ego).