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

At 4:18:22 PM on Sunday, February 5, 2006, Richard
Wordingham wrote:

> --- 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.

But under what circumstances? I'm no engineer, but I
suspect that this requires knowing a good deal about the
nature of at least the noise and quite possibly the signal
as well, and probably not just qualitatively, either. It's
not clear that it's possible to have that kind of knowledge
about language, and we certainly don't have it now.

Brian