Gerry flips his lid at Knut:

>So what Knut?
>
>Your presentation is neither scientific nor does it contribute towards the
>betterment of mankind.

Have I missed the motivation behind Gerry's harsh attitude towards
Knut for asking good questions about Nostratic? This _is_ a
Nostratic list afterall. Perhaps, Gerry should contribute towards
the betterment of mankind by refraining from grumpy posting unless
it gives us better insight into the workings of Proto-Nostratic.

I don't think it would be a shocker to expose the fact that
Nostratic is not well-worked out yet. There are a million-and-one
general hypotheses so far on how it operates and little agreement.
That doesn't mean that talking about Nostratic issues should be
banned.

I still think that agreement on grammatical processes within
Proto-Nostratic cannot be attained until the structure of the
Nostratic family tree is fully agreed upon. Most agree that IE,
Uralic and Altaic are closer to each other than to the rest of
Nostratic and this is certainly a starting point. Bomhard has
published his views on this tree structure. I also have my views
presented online at my website where I've drawn out a similar but
slightly divergeant tree. (It differs a bit in the placement of
ElamoDravidian and Sumerian but ends up being much like Bomhard's.)

Now, it's probably too soon to worry about word order when the
grammar hasn't even been figured out but perhaps by comparing
AfroAsiatic against Kartvelian on the one hand and Eurasiatic
languages on the other will be more profitable than randomly
selecting just about any Nost.language for comparison. Eurasiatic
languages seem to show SOV word order on the whole. AfroAsiatic
does show alotta VSO but if you look at Kartvelian, we see SOV
once again. The only difference between the more common SOV and
the AfroAsiatic VSO pattern is the placement of the verb.

Overall, this tells me that SOV is the likeliest word order for
Nostratic... and no, Gerry, it can't be "proven". But then again,
we can't prove that quarks physically exist except by way of
the theory of quantum mechanics. In case you weren't aware,
the study of comparative linguistics, particularly long-range
comparative linguistics, can only be theoretical.

- love gLeN



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