Re[2]: [tied] searching for common words for all today's languages

At 12:18:38 AM on Sunday, February 5, 2006, ytielts wrote:

>>> Also, does he believe the out of africa theory. If he
>>> does, he should have made some efforts to search for
>>> common roots for all today's languages.

>> Not at all. He shared the mainstream view that (1) human
>> languages have been spoken for a very long time, probably at
>> least 100,000 years, and (2) the rate of linguistic change,
>> though quite variable, is great enough that in general a few
>> thousand years suffice to obliterate all but the faintest
>> traces of common origin of two languages. It follows that
>> there is no hope of detecting shared vocabulary that goes
>> back to the origin of human language: even if any exists, it
>> cannot be identified as such.

[...]

> Thanks for your reply, Brian. It is generally agreed by
> most mainstream anthropologists that homo sapiens sapiens
> originates in Africa. That means that all their
> descendants should have used a common language somewhere
> in Africa.

Not necessarily, no. But it's a reasonable working
hypothesis, so long as one remembers that that's *all* it
is.

> There should be a genetic link between all the
> present-day languages. Don't you agree?

It doesn't matter whether there is or not: for the reasons
given above, all demonstrable traces of such a link must
have been destroyed millennia ago.

Brian