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From: petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
Subject: Re: Correction of PBS Nova lies
Message-ID: <petrichD2p5zr.13D@netcom.com>
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <3fnqsn$7iu@netaxs.com>
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 1995 09:21:27 GMT
Lines: 79

In article <3fnqsn$7iu@netaxs.com>, jenster <jenster@netaxs.com> wrote:
>[ Article crossposted from sci.lang.translation ]
>[ Author was William E Meuse ]
>[ Posted on Fri, 20 Jan 1995 01:24:58 GMT ]

>  Recently pbs Nova broadcast a program on the original human language 
>that was all lies. For example, they determined that the oldest words for 
>Water going back 6000 years was "WOD" according to the American 
>researchers and "WETI" according to the Soviets. Where do they get this 
>crap from?

	These are _reconstructed_ words for "water" in languages that had
no written record, but which are inferred to exist from correspondences 
in fundamental features of recorded languages.

	The first one, actually something like "wodor", is the
reconstructed ancestral Indo-European form, and is about as
well-established as any reconstruction can be. One can certainly ask
exactly how it was pronounced (that "d" may be more like a "t", at least
according to some linguists), but that there was such a word is _very_
clear from how the sounds of the words in _recorded_ languages correspond
to each other. Its age is probably about 5500-6500 years before the 
present time.

	The second one is more controversial, since it refers to a
proposed grouping of several language families -- Nostratic or 
Eurasiatic, whose core includes Indo-European, Uralic, and Altaic. This 
was arrived at by some Soviet linguists, who have actually gone into 
detail about sound correspondences, such as this one:

IE -- Uralic and Altaic
Kw ~ Ko, Ku
K ~ Ka
K' ~ Ka", Ke, Ki

where the "K" includes all the "k" and "g" sounds; a set of three 
voicings is reconstructed for IE and Altaic; they collapse into voiceless 
("k") for Uralic.

	This is much more controversial, for a number of reasons. Much of
the Nostratic work is in Russian, and only in recent years has become
well-known out of the (former) Soviet bloc (Vitaly Shevoroshkin's works
contain a lot of stuff on Nostratic, for those who are curious). Also, a
lot of linguists think that if one tries to go back too far, the process
of language change will cause too much garbling for relationships to be
retrievable. In addition, there is also the association with attempts to
find humanity's original language, a perennial field of crackpottery which
even some Nostraticists prefer to avoid. The age of Nostratic would be 
about 12,000-15,000 years (about the end of the last Ice Age).

... Just to set the record straight, here are the oldest Human 
>words for Water (WOHA) so you can judge for yourselves the quality of Nova.

>Ancient Egyptian  -  MA      - 6,000 years ago
>Sumerian          -  A
>Middle Egyptian   -  MU 
>Akkadian          -  MU
>Elamite           -  ZUL
>Hurrian           -  SHIYIE
>Aramaic           -  MEYEEN
>Canaanite         -  MIY
>Luvian            -  WEEDANTS - no older than 4,000 years ago
>Hittite, Thracian, Palaic - WATAR  - no older than 4,000 years ago.

	Of these, the Egyptian, Akkadian, Aramaic, and Canaanite ones 
(the latter three all Semitic) all have the form *mV, the Luwian and 
Hittite forms look like the aforementioned Indo-European form (in fact, 
they _are_ IE langauges), and the others fall into none of those groups.

>By the way, if this is not the appropriate newsgroup for this, can 
>someone crosspost it and let me know what is? I'm not that experienced on 
>the Net, though I do know a lot about words for Water. 

	You've got the right group. :-)
-- 
Loren Petrich, the Master Blaster
petrich@netcom.com                   Happiness is a fast Macintosh
lip@s1.gov                           And a fast train

