--- In nostratic@yahoogroups.com, enlil@... wrote:

>
> 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.

Hello, dear Glen!
Is everything OK?

I agree with you about Nostratic. It's far from be demonstrated.
As for me, it is perfectly plausible the existence of this macro-
family, but we disperately need a more careful scientific method.
No serious attempt has been done in order to safely reconstruct
proto-languages for many families. In the last days I found some
stuff about proto-Uralic, and I noticed that a proto-form is
attributed to the common language even if the word actually occur
only in Khanty and in Mansi. In other cases a single initial
consonant is reconstructed for words with entirely different sounds
in different languages, e.g. a /s^/ that gives sometimes /z^/,
sometimes /s^/, sometimes /s/ and sometimes /h/ with no logic
at all.

> 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...
>

I bought a book about macro-families. It provides an entire set of
proto-Nivkh roots, and among other miscellaneous stuff, the entire
set of Nostratic protoforms reconstructed by Dolgopolsky. I notice
that often they are based on historical languages and mixed up in a
crazy sillabub of milk, vodka, lemon juice, sugar and chicken blood.
In many instances an IE root is used even if I have sufficient
evidence to suspect that it is a non-IE substratum item.
For example, if Germanic /*matha-/ "worm" is a substratum item linked
with Proto-Uralic /*mato-/ "worm, snake", how could we project it in
common IE? To use it in order to prove a IE - Uralic link would be a
tautology. If we have a root /gWel-/ "to kill" found only in
Germanic, can we know its source and consider it IE in order to match
it with a Kartvelian item?
Somebody considered the Albanian word /bolbë/ "disgrace" as an output
of a Nostratic root /*bal-/ or something similar, meaning "wound,
bad". But the Albanian item is a Latin loanword (forms derived from
*volva "change of Fortune" are found in Romance varieties).
Ironically, a Nostraticist would list here also
Italian /balordo/ "dull, foolish, doltish", that is derived from bis
+ luridu(m)! An absurdity.
Nostraticists study languages in a truely airy way, so their
competence is often vanified by paralogism.

> 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

But despite of all this, it would be nice to discuss every evidence.
Nothing can be constructed on silence and on desert lists .
I already noticed signals of decay in Yahoo.
In Cybalist almost nothing can be discussed but insignificant sparse
details, other potentially interesting groups are abandoned day after
day. Our quarrels about Etruscan were better than this.

Best wishes

Marco