The same rules that created PIE can be used. Instead of only IE languages
you use it on Semitic, Dravidian, IE, Turkic, etc. It's a datamining problem.
In datamining the most important thing is clustering. In clusters, the members
resemble each other more than they resemble members of other clusters.

That is basically the language-family problem.

What impedes it is IE. The history of the development of historical linguistics
has been that everything that can be found has been put in IE. That is the
reason it has two roots for fire, water, one, etc.

If the same rules used for IE were used for Nostratic, then IE would get
one root for water, one for fire, one for one, etc, and then the others
can be put in other language families.

After sufficient number of words of different languages have been
collected electronically and put into suitable shape any number of
zillions of datamining algorithms can be applied to the data to produce
clusters. Algorithms that are used for genetics have already been used for
IE, e.g. works of Tarnow, etc.

I am wondering how long Nostraticists will continue to put everything
into IE or if they will switch from monogenesis to multigenesis and
at the same time switch from the 100% divergence model to one that
is divergence-convergence.


Piotr Gasiorowski wrote:

----- Original Message -----
From: "H.M. Hubey" <hubeyh@...>
To: <Nostratica@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, January 31, 2003 3:50 PM
Subject: Re: [Nostratica] Cardinal and Ordinal Integers


> It would be just as easy to construct them as having two separate roots from two separate language families which met someplace and mixed.

Not just as easy, unless you can identify the source. And if the roots in question don't _look_ like loanwords (i.e., if they obey the normal phonotactic constraints of PIE and behave like any "native" morphemes with regard to derivation and inflection), there is no ground for assuming borrowing. Occam would be at you with his razor.

Piotr


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...
M. Hubey
...
hubeyh@...
http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey