Re: basque and circassian

From: Peter T. Daniels (grammatim_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 02/20/05 

Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2005 00:11:53 GMT

brennus wrote:
>
> What Jacques wrote is just plain inane. I'm not going to comment on
> that.
>
> Peter, if you keep up with the latest literature in linguistics you
> will know that some linguists do believe that all of the worlds 30 or
> so language families (or groupings)can probably be reduced to just
> five or six superfamiles and that some linguists are even trying to
> connect these to a common human proto-language spoken, probably in
> Africa, about 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. Linguists and
> anthropologists are also finding that there is an approximate
> correlation between human genes and language groupings even granted
> that people can change languages and sometimes change them very fast.
> :)

Please see my Book Notice on Greenberg's *Indo-European and Its Closest
Relatives* in the latest number of *Language* (no. 4 of 2004 IIRC), or
you can see it in its unedited form somewere withing the sci.lang
archive that may or may not still be kept by google groups. (When no one
volunteered to do vol. 2 the first time it was announced, I asked for
it; and when I found that vol. 1 hadn't been done in Lg., I was invited
to request it from the publisher.)

The alleged correlation between genes and language is fraudulent (as I
have said in print and as Jacques went to a great deal of trouble to
spell out explicitly in an early number of LINGUIST List (I don't know
if this link will still get you there, but it's LINGUIST List 3.81 if it
doesn't)): http://linguistlist.org/issues/3/3-81.html#1

You don't mention the alleged correlation with dentition patterns
because that also didn't exactly pan out, either.

Your "some linguists," besides the late great Joseph H. Greenberg, are a
handful of loonies called Merritt Ruhlen and his circle. Linguists who
actually know the data involved put no credence at all into their
claims. 

-- 
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@att.net

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