Re: [tied] searching for common words for all today's languages

----- Original Message -----

From: Richard Wordingham

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Sunday, February 05, 2006 3:18 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] searching for common words for all today's languages

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...> wrote:

> >   At the same time, he fervently _believed_ that any
> > information regarding that most ancient ancestor was not
> > retrievable;

> Yes, because he understood exactly why this is the case.  It
> isn't, as you are trying to suggest, a matter of blind
> belief or faith; it follows directly from what we know about
> linguistic change and the age of human language.  If any
> signal of common ancestry has actually persisted down to the
> present, it cannot rise above the level of the background
> noise and therefore cannot be shown to exist.  Looking for
> traces of proto-world is a waste of time; believing that one
> has found them is at best naive.

Some radar systems regularly search for and find signals that are way
below the level of noise.

Richard.

***

Patrick:

One of the reasons I was constrained to use Sumerian is that it has signals that are actually meaningful at a very rudimentary level:

 

ma, 'land'.

 

How many languages do we all know in which a morpheme of this shape is associated with 'land/mound', etc.? Either alone or combined with recognizable formants.

***