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From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Word Count in Proto-Afroasiatic, was Sanskrit: etc.
In-Reply-To: seagoat@primenet.com's message of 27 Nov 1996 17:14:01 -0700
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Date: Wed, 4 Dec 1996 19:08:03 GMT
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In article <seagoat.724.01097FBB@primenet.com> seagoat@primenet.com
(John A. Halloran) writes:

>As another contribution to this subject of word counts for ancient languages,
>I have received my copy of Christopher Ehret's 1995 book Reconstructing
>Proto-Afroasiatic (Proto-Afrasian), in which the number of reconstructed words
>is 1,011.

The reconstructions in Ehret's book are *roots*, rather than *words*, as I
recall.  These are the lexical-meaning-bearing portions of words without the
derivational and grammatical affixes.

Since the language was clearly inflected (as evidenced by its descendants), the
number of *roots* is a low minimum for the number of words, by a factor on the
order of 6 or so.
-- 
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_
