Re: Nostratic

From: Anti-imperialist (ai_at_anti-imperialist.net)
Date: 09/18/04 

Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 19:26:07 -0700

Jacques Guy wrote:
>
> Rex F. May wrote:
>
> > >> Would this, too, be "either coincidence or genetic"?
> > >> Latin mulg-e:re 'to milk'
> > >> Saami mielga 'breast'
> > >> Hungarian mell 'breast'
> > >> Tamil mulai 'breast'
> > >> Malayalam mulai 'breast'
>
> > Hm. I'm agnostic about the whole thing, but how many such examples are
> > there out there, and could they be explained by borrowing?
>
> No need. There are thousands of words to pick, in thousands of
> languages. The truly extraordinary thing would be if you
> could not find a dozen or two (or three, of five) that do
> look the same in a dozen of unrelated languages.
>
> And anyway, Tamil and Malayalam are both Dravidian languages,
> so strike one out,

Why? The more the root is attested, the more the "coincidence" theory
evaporates.

 and the wondrous evidence shrinks to
> Latin, Saami, Hungarian, Tamil.
>
> And, if I remember correctly, Saami is closely related to
> Finnish, more distantly to Hungarian, so strike one out,

Why? The more the root is attested, the more the "coincidence" theory
evaporates.

> and the wondrous evidence shrinks to Latin, Saami, Tamil.

Actually there is a hell of a lot more than that for that root.

Penutian - "mulk'"
Hokan - "milqe"
Macro-Carib - "e'moki"
Equatorial - "mirkoi"
Andean - "malq'a"
Chibchan-Paezan - "murki"
Almosan-Keresouian - "melqw"

> It's the usual "Wow! Birds have two wings and fly, and so do
> bats and jumbo jets, so jumbo jets and bats have feathers
> and lay eggs."

I believe there was an article in Scientific American that looked at
this widely attested root and figured that the odds of this being
"coincidence" as you say were something like 1 billion to 1.

Anyway, we don't "pick 2 languages at random and look for lexical
similarities", which is the red herring of your whole argument. We look
at whole families at a time (as Greenberg does) and then coincidence
gets harder and harder to explain. Even the early Indo-Europeanists
were not so stupid as to pick 2 languages out of the hat and compare
them - they compared large numbers of languages to arrive at IE - and
BTW, to shoot another one of your lame args - IE was proven before it
was ever reconstructed, nor were any sound-change correspondences found
yet. As the SciAm article noted, mathematical models have been devised
to test your "coincidence" theory and it turns out your theory rests on
some rather outrageous statistical premises. 

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