Re: Why the Proto-Indoeuropean numerals are not motivated within IE?

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" bm.brian@ wrote:
>
> > > *I suggest you the book "global etymolgies" of Merrit
> > > Ruhlen, in that book the author deals with shared lexical
> > > items across dozens of languages from all over the world
> > > and those shared lexical items are a legacy of the once
> > > proto world language spoken by the first "successful"
> > > modern human (successful in the sense that he was the most
> > > recent common progenitor of all humans living todays)
>
> Waste of time: it's pseudo-scientific handwaving. If Ruhlen
> ever knew what an etymology is, he'd forgotten by the time
> he wrote that rubbish.
>
> > Well, I won't [go] so far as to label it as "pseudo-science", but I agree
> > Ruhlen's work is nasty.
>

Actually, his 1994's article "Global Etymologies" was co-authored with John Bengtson, but I've got a French copy of his book "The Origin of Language. Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue." In short, he's a mass-comparativist (not to be confused with macro-comparativist or Nostraticist) like Greenberg himself.

All these people (Greenberg, Ruhlen, Bengtson) belong to what I call the "Sapir-Swadesh school", whose main representants are Edward Sapir and Morris Swadesh and which sees Comparative Linguistics as a branch of Anthropology. By contrast, modern IE studies, founded by 19th century's Neogrammarians, are a branch of Classical Phylology (anecdotically, some IE-ists have still the habit of using the Greek alphabet for transcribing ancient Greek).