--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "ytielts" <ytielts@...> wrote:
>
> Is there anyone who knows where to find the common words for all
> today's languages? I haave just learned from this group that the
> Chinese word <quan> is correspondent with the latin root<aqua>.
This is
> really fascinating.
Now I am worried you might be ironic. I _proposed_ (as Rob would be
the first to point out) that the PIE root that is ancestral to Latin
aqua might be _loaned_ from a Sino-Tibetan word ancestral to Early
Middle Chinese kwen' "watering chanel". The interesing thing is that
the loan might coincide with the invention of agriculture, so that
it was part of a "culture package" which enabled a small number of
cultures to expand on an unprecedented scale, thus founding the
great language families we know today.
>Is there any information available for the
> correspondent sound roots in the superfamily of Eurasian(60,000-
40,000
> years ago as proposed by Merritt Ruhlen in 1944), from which some
big
> language families such as Afro-Asiatic, Eurasiatic including
> indoeuropean languages and Dene-Caucasian involving Chinese, my
first
> language, by the way, are believed to derive by the main stream
> genetists like Cavalli-sforza, Peter Underhill(both are the
> authoritative genetists working with the HGP) and linguists like
> Merritt Ruhlen? Thanks for some reliable referrences.
Ruhlen's list of look-alikes is a stone in the shoe for linguistics.
Nobody knows what to make of it, so it's generally condemned as
unscientific and Ruhlen is one of the guys we are not supposed to
play with. Now, if the words on his list were part of a Neolithic
agricultural culture package, its existence begins to make sense.
Cf. also mr. Kelkar's long list of "aqua" words: if the original
sense of the word was not "water", but "watering channel", its
spread suddenly makes sense.
And BTW, this means I might tap the reservoir of proposed Eurasiatic
or Nostratic roots and claim them to be Neolithic loans instead.
Torsten