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

From: mkelkar2003
Message: 43251
Date: 2006-02-05

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "etherman23" <etherman23@...> wrote:
>
> --- 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).
>

Greenberg's work on AmeriInd family is well accepted by linguists and
more importantly confirmed by the results from genetics. A lone man
has done more than thousands of IEL working over 200 years with
unlimited resources.

"Transcripts of a 1997 PBS film:

<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2120glang.html>


"LUIGI CAVALLI-SFORZA: When we took all the (genetic) data from
American natives, they clearly fell into three classes, and they
correspond exactly to the linguistic families that have been
postulated by Greenberg. Not only that, but the family which is most
heterogeneous of all genetically is the one that is linguistically
more heterogeneous of all (parenthesis added)."

M. kelkar