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

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "etherman23" <etherman23@...> wrote:

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "ytielts" <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? Thanks for some reliable referrences.
>
> Ruhlen and Greenberg use the method of "mass comparison" which is a
> load of crap. It consists of looking at lists of words from various
> languages and picking out lookalikes of vaguely similar meaning. It
> has two (well, at least two) fatal flaws. First, there's no

mechanism

> to distinguish inherited words from borrowings. Second, it's easy

to

> miss seeing cognate words that don't look alike (like English I and
> Latin ego).

Which means the method is partially crap.


Torsten