Re: searching for common words for all today's languages

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

>
> --- 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
>

Torsten, thanks for your reply. However, I am not ironic.
Do you believe the out of africa theory? If you do, can you list
some common word roots for me?