Re[2]: [tied] searching for common words for all today's languages

At 9:40:05 AM on Saturday, February 4, 2006, ytielts wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> <BMScott@...> wrote:

>> At 12:20:54 PM on Friday, February 3, 2006, ytielts wrote:

>>> 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?

>> If I may quote the late Larry Trask, in a 5 October 2003
>> post to sci.lang:
>>
>> First, Ruhlen is not recognized by anybody in linguistics
>> as a member of the profession. Every single linguist who
>> is acquainted with his work regards him as a crackpot and
>> a charlatan.

> Brian, thanks for your reply. However, I am not ironic.

Neither am I: my point is simply that what Merritt Ruhlen
believes has very little to do with what historical
linguists believe.

> Can you give me constructive suggestions instead of just
> giving me some quotation? I have no idea about Larry Trask
> or his works. Could you let me know where to find them?

Larry Trask was a historical linguist with a particular
interest in Basque; his _The History of Basque_ (Routledge,
1997) is authoritative.

> Also, does he believe the out of africa theory. If he
> does, he should have made some efforts to search for
> common roots for all today's languages.

Not at all. He shared the mainstream view that (1) human
languages have been spoken for a very long time, probably at
least 100,000 years, and (2) the rate of linguistic change,
though quite variable, is great enough that in general a few
thousand years suffice to obliterate all but the faintest
traces of common origin of two languages. It follows that
there is no hope of detecting shared vocabulary that goes
back to the origin of human language: even if any exists, it
cannot be identified as such.

In the last chapter of his textbook _Historical Linguistics_
(Arnold, 1996) he discusses this and less ambitious attempts
to establish extremely remote linguistic relationships; you
might find the discussion instructive.

Brian