Re: IE, AA, Nostratic and Ringo

Piotr, please patronize an ignorant lurker. It seems to me that the
word-comparison strategy could be handled with some utility if it
weren't so arbitrary, as you point out. I would expect that one would
define a list of the thousand most basic words in all languages --
most
likely body parts, numerals, family relations, and crucial
environmental components like sun, sky, earth, etc -- and then
perform
a statistical comparison across languages. That comparison would have
to be adjusted for the specific language phoneme peculiarities, but
my
impression is that you linguists already have a good system for
defining phonemes: all those weird little letter combinations you use
appear to precisely specify pronunciation. You should be able to come
up with some sort of measure of "pronunciation distance" (e.g.,
English
"sh" is close to English "ch", but more distant from German "z") I
realize that all this sounds pretty far out on a limb, but you could
establish a baseline for comparison using relationships among
existing
languages. Anyway, all this seems rather straightforward to me, so I
suppose that it's already been done, or perhaps already been shown to
be balderdash.

And please forgive my layman's terminology; I still can't figure out
what "fricative" and "glottal" mean.