Re: [tied] Pronunciation of "r" - again?

----- Original Message -----
From: "glen gordon" <glengordon01@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, October 07, 2005 2:59 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Pronunciation of "r" - again?


> Andrew Jarrette:
> > Sounds like the legend of the Tower of Babel and
> > the other Biblical ideas about the origins of
> > language might not be all that far off from the
> > truth, at least metaphorically.
>
> Again, I think this is offtopic for this forum.

***
Patrick:

I am hoping most list-members will know the difference between a harmless
remark and an attempt to introduce a new topic.

***

> There is a Nostratic forum for this topic that you
> may wish to join, although I sadly no longer feel
> that I can recommend it to anyone since the debates
> have become plagued with nonsensical pseudoscience
> as seems to be too often the case with Nostratic.
>
> Actually, Nostratic is *not* meant to be the ancestor
> of all language groups around the world. Only a very
> tiny subset of them. Chinese, for example, is spoken
> by millions of people but it is not considered to
> be Nostratic. Neither are Swahili and related Bantu
> languages. Linking Nostratic to the Tower of Babel
> legend is way off the mark.
>
> As Patrick has said, Allan Bomhard is one of the
> foremost authors in the Nostratic field so far,
> however I think he is also the most sensible so far
> because he undoes some of the flaws inherent in
> the earlier works by Illich-Svitych and others.
>
> Being one who grew up in a religious household with
> man antiquated ideas about language origins, I urge
> people to be cautious about assuming direct links
> because it has been a source of confusion in the past.
>
> In my opinion, the origin of communication goes back
> to the Big Bang, 12 billion years ago :) The origin
> of gestural communication goes back millions of
> years. The origin of _vocal_ communication complete
> with a standardized grammatical system goes back
> about hundreds of thousands of years. The origin
> of the common language (aka "Proto-World") that begat
> all known modern languages probably occured only
> circa 80,000 BCE. Nostratic is merely dated to 15,000
> BCE and IE is only 4000 BCE. That's the timescale
> that I understand.
>
>
>
> = gLeN
>
>
>
>
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