Re: [tied] How should Nostratic be viewed?

I'm sorry Piotr, "Drifting into each other" was probably a bad choice of words (I'm not that great at explaining what's on my mind),
what I meant was that if all languages are ultimately derived from a "Proto-World" , then it would seem that they would have evolved more gradually, resulting in less clear divisions between language families. Rather the clear distinction between language families almost seems to be the result of some kind of "punctuated equilibrium" as languages are somewhat clearly within their own families and groupings, not "drifting into" each other with no clear linguistic bounderies. In other words, we see no family that is medial between Uralic and Indo-European, or between Altaic and Ainu, or whatever ("genetic spaces"), or between Hellenic and Indo-Iranian, or Thracian and Phrygian, etc.

-Michael




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