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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: More Proto-World
In-Reply-To: tettaman@diva.EECS.Berkeley.EDU's message of 24 Oct 1994 17:17:49 GMT
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Date: Mon, 24 Oct 1994 19:29:35 GMT
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In article <38gq7t$35a@agate.berkeley.edu> tettaman@diva.EECS.Berkeley.EDU
(Andrea Tettamanzi) writes:

>As for the question whether all extant human languages can be traced back to a
>common ancestor, there is a very entertaining pamphlet by Merritt Ruhlen, "The
>Origin of Language", which also gives some attempts of global etymologies.
>Everybody interested in these things should read it.

Ruhlen, and his mentor Greenberg, are presumably two of the researchers
referred to in the original posting in this thread.

Ruhlen's book, which I *have* read, is full of special pleading, bad methodo-
logy, and general conspiracy-paranoiac whining.  I'm sorry, but he's hardly the
model for research in this area.

There has been a long series of messages on the LINGUIST mailing list in recent
weeks regarding the comparative method and whether there are implicit limits
thereon, with sidebars on mass comparison a la Greenberg.  This mailing list is
archived at archive.umich.edu, if you want to see what's been said there.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
