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From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Ruhlen's "On the Origin of Languages": a Review (I)
In-Reply-To: hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu's message of 18 Sep 1996 21:30:18 -0400
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Date: Fri, 20 Sep 1996 18:02:21 GMT
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In article <hubey.843096202@pegasus.montclair.edu> hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu
(H. M. Hubey) writes:

>4) The comparative method specifices that we should stick to only a few
>selected semantic concepts (probably for the reasons that we cannot have what
>you just did).

No, the comparative method makes no such specification.  We comparativists are
perfectly happy to compare *any* semantic domain.

The restriction of study to selected semantic concepts is one of glottochrono-
logy's Kantian tail chases; I do not think it is even fair to saddle all of
lexicostatistics with this one.  Any evidence which points to the invalidity of
the hypothesis is ignored.
-- 
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_
