Re: [tied] substratum ( it was Re: Creole Romance?)

On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:04:49 +0000, Richard Wordingham
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

>--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "alex" <alxmoeller@...> wrote:
>> Miguel Carrasquer wrote:
>> > No, it's a fact. As I made clear, in Italy alone, a dozen or more
>> > independent language families were spoken before the rise of the
>Roman
>> > Empire. There were hundreds of language families spoken in the
>> > Americas before European colonization. The same goes for Africa,
>New
>> > Guinea.
>
>Bold statements! Can you justify them? What did Italy have besides
>Nostratic languages? Are you completely certain Greenberg's Amerind
>is nonsense? Even if it is, hundreds or dozens of families?

Whether the languages were related at some deeper level is irrelevant. All
languages are, I believe.

If we take languages families at the level of Romance or Slavic, i.e. just
beyond mutual intelligibility, but easily recognizable as related even for
the untrained ear, there were a dozen or so in Ancient Italy, and there
were hundreds in the Pre-Columbian Americas.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...