Marco:

> The three lists Nostratic, Nostratica and Nostratic-L
> seem to be dead. There's no sign of life.
> Several lists are kept active almost only by mails
> like this. The only thing one can do is feeling blue.
> Thanks for having joined Language_extinction!

The problem that I see the most has nothing to do with
the capabilities of the moderator. In actuality, it is
the topic itself that presents problems. There really,
sadly, isn't much to talk about Nostratic because not
enough has been done in this study to warrant fertile
discussion. The tendency among Nostraticists is to
produce a long list of "reconstructions" without full
attention to credible phonology, phonotactics,
morphology, etc. and say "There! Proof!". All the fuller
analysis is left to the skeptic to decrypt.

This frustrates the hell out of me but we see this time
and time again. I give Bomhard credit for trying to make
a more detailed opus of Nostratic and to resolve some
sound correspondances and typology issues but even
with him there isn't a complementary analysis of some
of the troubled etyma that he reconstructs. A perfect
example of what I'm talking about is the first person
singular which Bomhard reconstructs several times with
several different forms. We are not told what the
different forms represent, at least not in "Indo-European
and the Nostratic Hypothesis". Perhaps there is a work
of his that I failed to come across where this is
explained, although I'm not holding my breath. That
leaves skeptics like me to shake my head, and offer
some desperate solutions to account for it all.

Since both Bomhard and even Greenberg recognize some
pronominal suppletion in Nostratic, that is, pronouns
that DON'T follow the so-called "mitian" pattern, I've
concluded that it would be safe to reconstruct two sets
of pronouns in Nostratic with one set being ergative
(*nu~*mu, *tu, *si) and the other oblique (*u, *nu, *i),
accounting for the Dravidian pronouns.

I'd like if somebody said, "Dammit, Glen, you're all
wrong." and provide me a competent, well-educated
reason for why I'm wrong, but more often than not
being that it's Nostratic afterall, nobody says
anything and the topic erodes into flying saucers
and the lost continent of Atlantis.

Cuz in the end, who wants to talk seriously about
Nostratic? Perhaps a more apt question is: Who is
competent and level-headed enough to talk about
Nostratic seriously? It seems like just a handful.
Guess I'm just gonna have to write a book of my
own