Re: Diachronic conlanging

Hallo!

On Wed, 22 Nov 2006 08:40:24 +0000, R A Brown wrote:

> Eric Christopherson wrote:
> [snip]
> >
> > Yes, that is correct. I think that what I asked was (accidentally)  only
> > part of what I intended to ask. I was actually wondering if  anyone had
> > attempted to construct a protolang for two languages which  are not
> > known to be related, e.g. PIE and Proto-Semitic. I think  that'd be
> > really tough, but the result could be very cool.
>
> Nostratic does that and much, much more :)
>
> See
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic
Ah, Nostratic!  It's an interesting idea, but most of the evidence is not
very convincing.  It tells a lot that the pro-Nostratic community is split
into several factions who use different sound correspondences and
reconstruct different sets of Proto-Nostratic roots (the reconstructions
given on the Wikipedia page are just one opinion).  At most one of these
reconstructions can be right; clearly, a method that yields so many false
positives must be unreliable.

Yet, I think that there is something to it.  At least, it seems like
Indo-European, Uralo-Siberian (Uralic-Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan and
Eskimo-Aleut) and Altaic are related to each other, perhaps also
Kartvelian, Etruscan and Sumerian.  I have much more doubt about
Afro-Asiatic and Dravidian being related to these languages.

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