[tied] Re: Nominative: A hybrid view

Hi Jens,

you make some valid points. I hope you are right. I will be happy
to agree with you one day. And no, I did not mean the speaking
skills of our forefathers were very different from ours. Hence my
irony about the inability of comparative linguists to actually
explain how a certain reconstruct was pronounced. I have a problem
with this particular weakness of comparative linguistics as it is,
and not as it can be.

Eva


--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen <jer@...>
wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, 31 May 2003, fortuna11111 wrote:
>
> [...]
> > It is only possible to assume that at the early stages
> > of human development language had not reached its level of

complexity

> > as of today. Yet this is almost impossible to prove, especially

with

> > the tools of comparative linguistics.
>
> I hate to disagree with you, Eva, but I do think the tools of

comparative

> linguistics prove the opposite for the time spans we can bridge

(which may

> in fact not be what you are talking about, in which case there is no
> disagreement). We are not dealing with some primitive pre-human

with an

> articulatory apparatus still in the making. It is not my impression

tha

> protolanguages are in any recurrent way different from languages

actually

> spoken today. Due to limitations of our knowledge, however, they may
> appear both poorer (if we fail to reconstruct a fine opposition

which has

> been buried in "noise") and richer (if we make wrong combinations

and want

> to accomodate them all), but that is another matter. For all

intents and

> purposes I see simply the same factors operate in history and in

recent

> times. If we do not observe a change *dw- > erk- as in Armenian

elsewhere,

> it is simply because we do not sit down and wait 4000 years for it

to grow

> that strange.
>
> Jens