Re[7]: [tied] Re: PIE-Arabic Correspondences (was Brugmann's Law)

At 4:56:16 PM on Sunday, January 20, 2008, fournet.arnaud
wrote:

> From: Brian M. Scott

[...]

>> 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.

> I have pondered issues of methods for long, What you are
> expressing is just a "can't be done" dogma.

As Richard points out, it isn't quite 'can't be done', and
it isn't dogma: it's basic science.

Brian