Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!rutgers!venus.sun.com!cs.utexas.edu!howland.erols.net!netcom.com!petrich
From: petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
Subject: Re: Reposts: Sumerian
Message-ID: <petrichDxnIA8.HKK@netcom.com>
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <5184eg$p8a@halley.pi.net> <seagoat.546.005359F7@primenet.com>
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 1996 03:13:20 GMT
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Sender: petrich@netcom14.netcom.com

In article <seagoat.546.005359F7@primenet.com>,
John A. Halloran <seagoat@primenet.com> wrote:

>The Sumerian vowel-only words are words for water, food, sex, and housing.  
>You cannot say that the vowel-only words of a modern language refer to such 
>basic features.

	That seems like a big fat non sequitur to me. Mr. Vidal's point
about short words being relatively basic ones holds even in "modern"
languages like English. Look at your favorite samples of written language
if you don't believe me. I think that the evidence of universality and
physiological adaptations strongly indicates that our species has had
language ever since it emerged from some other species. 

	[Ruhlen omitting Sumerian...]
>Do you mean that Ruhlen could have found words in Sumerian that are cognate to 
>his global roots?  If so, produce them yourself.  Or do you mean that if he 
>had included Sumerian in his 32 taxa that he would have had to come up with 27 
>alternate global roots in order to maintain his thesis that all languages 
>(including Sumerian) descend from a common ancestor?

	My guess on Ruhlen's omitting Sumerian is that he wanted to work
only with better-documented languages and language comparisons; thus, his
not using such putative macro-families as Nostratic and Dene-Caucasian and
Amerind. 

>Understand that I am not saying this to be argumentative, only to assert that 
>polygenesis, not monogenesis, of language is what the evidence indicates 
>actually occurred.

	WHAT "evidence"?
-- 
Loren Petrich				Happiness is a fast Macintosh
petrich@netcom.com			And a fast train
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