Torsten:

>The bizarre part is your misreading of my comment.

Now, now. Du calme. I'm not going to enter into another tense conversation. So what.
I misunderstood... no big whoop. I certainly haven't "condemned" Møller, although he
_is_ a little archaic so one automatically wonders how much benefit his works can now
provide to Nostratic. I'm simply stating what I see based on my own examination using
_modern_  knowledge about IE.

I said:

>See, here is what troubles me - the direct comparison of such things as ablaut between
>IE and AA, as if 15,000 years hadn't changed the two languages at all.

Torsten:

>Nonsense. Bomhard is comparing the reconstructed Proto-forms of the
>languages, thus PIE and PAA, not IE and AA as such. Forget about
>15,000.

I'm sorry - I don't follow. How might we forget about the immense span of time that
surely seperates these two language groups. Secondly, how can we assert that IE and
AA ablaut patterns are related when AAists can't even agree as to how conservative
Semitic's features are in respect to the larger AA family. Perhaps Semitic's vowel
permutations are innovative... Who knows? Certainly, not our good 19th-century friend
named Møller who had far less information to work with than we do now. Being that
Indo-Semitic theories flourished at this time, I can't help but place Møller within that
now-outdated movement. (Just in case you disagree: Indo-Semitic is now outdated
because it is generally agreed in the modern day that IE is probably related closer to
other languages like Etruscan, Uralic and Altaic, and likewise, Semitic is more closely
related to Egyptian, Berber, Cushitic and Chadic. Thus direct comparison between IE
and Semitic is pure folly without understanding the greater linguistic context in which these
two groups are found.)

Torsten:

>I was commenting on the abundance of those roots in Bomhard, not in
>the languages of the world.

Oh right. I'm sorry. I forgot - you mentioned this before. I'm skeptical, of course, because
there are still many supposed alternations that one might see in English that just aren't there.
- gLeN



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