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These matters seem to be of interest to the good people of Dover and Sherborn in MA (Maine? Massachussetts?), although they seem to be a bit hazy on the details. Perhaps we could send an AWAD delegation?

http://www.townonline.com/dover/news/local_regional/ds_covdsenglishms02192004.htm

Bingley


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they seem to be a bit hazy on the details. Perhaps we could send an AWAD delegation?

In case they're not quite as hazy on the details as they could be? We could give them some coaching on the process?


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Good find, Bingley! Too bad the small Massachusetts paper can't afford a fact checker to catch this and other problemettes:

...used articles like thou, thine and thy


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articles like thou, thine and thy

They probably got confused by the articles ža and žone.


#123165 02/20/04 03:04 PM
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Thanks, jenet. There's a merry band of linguists stretching back to Humboldt who are concerned with the typology of language: dealing e.g. with default word order for subject, object, and verb, noun and quantifier, etc. Greenberg and his students did much of the modern-day work on it. Here's a picture of Illich-Svitych and a reconstructed poem in Nostratic:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/6623/nostraticist.htm



#123166 02/22/04 06:52 PM
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Thanks again jheem; ....I know nothing about Nostratic and the controversies it engenders; however, am curious...is the argument about, there having been ONE language that was the progenitor of all the others? Or, (as I am assuming) about Nostratic being that one.


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I don't think anybody's saying that Nostratic is The Ur Language, merely that it is ancestral to the Indo-European languages and the Afro-Asiatic languages. There are plenty of languages that don't fit into either of these groups.


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I'm not sure that even the pro-Nostraticists argue that it's the proto-language. I guess it boils down to whether you think Neanderthal spoke or not. You're probably better off asking a pro-Nostraticist than me. There is a book called Nostratic: Sifting the Evidence edited by Joe Salmons, that I've been meaning to read. (And the Russian linguist whose name I was trying to remember earlier in this thread is Vitalij V. Shevoroshkin.)


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Leaving the Neanderthals out of this...Surely language must have been present in *some form when our first sapiens ancestors wandered off from Africa into Eurasia?


#123170 02/22/04 07:32 PM
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And, finally, in constructing such a theory, does one 'extrapolate?' That is, can one extrapolate backwards in time. Or, actually, can one extrapolate *in time* at all?

Insel, something bothered me about this too; but, I got so carried away by Nostratic that the post slipped my mind.

One can extend the inferences of biological evolution, to the somewhat similar process of reconstructing the evolution of language and extrapolate therefore. What is probably nagging you, is the "exrapolating backwards" bit. Extrapolation is neither backward or forward, but is certainly a comparative/relative process


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