At 6:14:28 AM on Sunday, January 20, 2008, fournet.arnaud
wrote:
[...]
> But Ruhlen's "success" is also linked with the fact that
> "serious" linguists have left the domain unexplored
> because of that 10 000-years time-limit, which is just a
> complete stupidity. If you say it 's not feasible
> scientifically, do not be surprised if dumbs, crack-pots,
> idiots and crooks invade the area.
Piotr has already pointed out that the 10,000-year time
limit is a straw man, and that serious historical linguists
have attempted long-range work. I would add that it is none
the less clear that evidence of linguistic relationships
will eventually be swamped by the noise introduced by random
changes. And on the evidence to date, this noise
accumulates more than fast enough to make any attempt to
reconstruct a 'proto-world' language an exercise in
crackpottery. Even just securely identifying a few odd
traces of one is highly unlikely: even if such traces still
exist, odds are that it's impossible to distinguish them
from false positives.
Brian