Feasibility of Long-Range Reconstructions (was: PIE-Arabic Correspon

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

> Brian M. Scott wrote:

>> 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.

> The "can't be done" dogma is **useless**

I wouldn't deduce that 'it can't be done' from Brian's argument. If
one can produce a reconstruction and say of it 'between 40% and 60% of
the words are wrong', that is still an accomplishment. After all, it
is likely that many of Pokorny's roots are plain wrong - a formal and
semantic match from just two branches may well be noise, but it could
also be real.

Richard.