Newsgroups: sci.lang
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From: mcv@inter.NL.net (Miguel Carrasquer)
Subject: Re: More Proto-World
Message-ID: <Cy4EL5.2uI@inter.NL.net>
Organization: NLnet
References: <37pqr1$ffn@tardis.trl.OZ.AU> <37sb2u$jgj@tardis.trl.OZ.AU> <38cds2INNbgr@SUNED.ZOO.CS.YALE.EDU> <hubey.782882530@pegasus.montclair.edu>
Date: Sun, 23 Oct 1994 10:03:04 GMT
Lines: 55

In article <hubey.782882530@pegasus.montclair.edu>,
H. M. Hubey <hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu> wrote:
>
>All joking aside, do you believe that humankind came from a single
>source, say about 100,000-200,000 which is more or less the
>standard belief these days?
>

Are you referring to the transition from Homo Erectus to Homo
Sapiens (which I find dated at 400,000-300,000), or to the transition 
from "archaic" Homo Sapiens (e.g. "Neanderthal man") to Homo Sapiens 
var. Sapiens (which my sources put at roughly 40,000 BP)?
The second date clearly looks more promising for Proto-World
(at least for our chances of recovering some of it)... but it is
by no means necessary that the spread of genes be equivalent to
the spread of language.  It's a possibility to be investigated.

>Aside from the above belief (or nonbelief) is there any difference "in
>kind" of what the proto-world, Nostratic, etc schools do that
>is not done by the orthodox/standard schools? Or is the
>difference only one of degree?
>If there is no difference "in kind" but only a "difference of
>degree" are there any statistical measures of how likely such
>apparent cognates are either real cognates or chance occurrences?

I think it's best to leave statistics out of this, unless you can
come up with a measure for the _quality_ of a reconstruction.
If you feed all the possible, attested sound changes into a
computer program, it will probably come up with "Guy's Law" or
worse.  You can prove that any sound can turn into any other sound,
which is not very helpful...  The same applies to semantic shifts.

I'm only (slightly) familiar with Illich-Svitych's Nostratic and
Greenberg's Amerind.  I found Illich-Svitych's work interesting
(leaving aside the poem in "Nostratic"), and Greenberg's 
unconvincing.  That doesn't mean that I accept Nostratic and
reject Amerind.  On historical and anthropological grounds, 
Amerind seems a very likely possibility, while Nostratic seems
a much more arbitrary grouping.  
Illich-Svitych's "Opyt sravnenija nostraticheskix jazykov" uses 
more or less the `traditional' means of reconstruction:
regular sound correspondences are looked for.  I'm sure the book
contains many errors and misinterpratations, but maybe some day it will
be regarded as we look on August Schleicher's works now: naive,
wrong on many counts, but still of historical interest (Illich-Svitych's
poem may have influenced my analogy here, as compared to Schleicher's
"Avis akvasas-ka" fable in the Ursprache).  Time will tell if today's
work on Nostratic and Proto-World is comaparable to Schleicher's, or
to that of other philologists who at the same time were still trying
to prove that all the languages of the world were derived from Hebrew.

-- 
Miguel Carrasquer         ____________________  ~~~
Amsterdam                [                  ||]~  
mcv@inter.NL.net         ce .sig n'est pas une .cig 
