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

From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 43264
Date: 2006-02-05

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

> > At the same time, he fervently _believed_ that any
> > information regarding that most ancient ancestor was not
> > retrievable;

> Yes, because he understood exactly why this is the case. It
> isn't, as you are trying to suggest, a matter of blind
> belief or faith; it follows directly from what we know about
> linguistic change and the age of human language. If any
> signal of common ancestry has actually persisted down to the
> present, it cannot rise above the level of the background
> noise and therefore cannot be shown to exist. Looking for
> traces of proto-world is a waste of time; believing that one
> has found them is at best naive.

Some radar systems regularly search for and find signals that are way
below the level of noise.

Richard.