Newsgroups: sci.lang
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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Linguists Debating Deepest Roots of Language
In-Reply-To: scharle@lukasiewicz.cc.nd.edu's message of 27 Jun 1995 14:37:18 GMT
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Date: Wed, 28 Jun 1995 23:24:41 GMT
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In article <3sp52u$43e@news.nd.edu> scharle@lukasiewicz.cc.nd.edu (scharle)
writes:

>Readers of sci.lang may be interested in an article in today's (Tuesday, June
>27) New York Times "Science Times" on Nostratic and a forthcoming book by
>Alexis Manaster Ramer.

The centerpiece of the article is one paper by AMR in a forthcoming book on
Nostratic with papers by several people.

However, the linguistics was so badly mangled that anyone not already fmailiar
with the material and issues will have gone away knowing less than before they
read it.  IMNSDHO.

The article didn't even get the origin of the name "Nostratic" right, attribu-
ting it to Soviet linguists who coined it to mean "our language."

If AMR (or one of the others named in the article) does not publish a set of
corrections for the factual errors, I'll write one up myself.
-- 
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_
