Re: IE, AA, Nostratic etc.

  Danny,

Glad to hear you didn't take offense. I agree with most of what you are saying, but some things make me puzzled. Like this:

Religion, and I can think specifically of Islam and Catholic Christianity,
continually desires (or at least should strive) to explain beliefs in a
rational, relevant fashion, always evaluating itself in the light of what is
natural science (i.e. it would be foolish to say that the earth literally
has four corners, even though the Bible uses that idiom).  Yet orthodoxy and
historical continuity cannot be sacrificed; doctrines like
transubstantiation and the perpetual virginity of Mary are matters of faith,
not science, and may or may not be true in a purely rational view.

Do Islam and Catholicism really strive to evaluate themselves in the light of science (I never heard Khomeini or the Pope talk about this) and what has this to do with language studies?

 

And why is the monogenesis of languages "linked to religious dogma"? To me, it seems likely that language arose just once, in one single location, because all the peoples of Earth have a common origin, but I agree with you that a scenario where several tribes of people developed language independently of each other is not impossible, and we will probably never know exactly how it happened. Genetic studies have recently proved that all people on Earth must be very closely related. (Differences in skin colour etc. may appear large to us, but they are superficial. On a genetic level, the differences between people from different continents are negligible.) Some have even said - I don't remember where I saw this - that all of us can be tracked back to a small tribe of just a handful of people, so it seems probable that all languages are related the same way, even though we have lost all traces of their development from a common source.