Re: [ontolog-forum] 15,000-year-old ancestral language

[matthew lange <mclange@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have to wonder, which "bark", which worm? Did water and tea really not make the list? Tea especially.

Also, in our quest to find meaning to words, let us not forget the importance of the positioning of line breaks (which can add a delightful element of punctuation. I hereby challenge the list to make different meaning with these words:

This Old Mother give Man Fire

To spit Black Bark Ashes

We pull Not That  Hand 

Ye Who flow 

I hear  What Thou Worm

On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 7:56 PM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 5/7/2013 5:29 PM, Rich Cooper wrote:
> It lists 23 words that are shared in a buncha modern languages,
> and the authors claim the 15,000 year old dating through statistical
> analysis.  They produce what they call a "Phylogenetic Tree
> of the Eurasiatic Language Superfamily".

Historical linguists have been trying to link multiple language
families to one another for years.  And they have been producing
some likely hypotheses, using various methods.  The following
paper does not have any startling new results, but they have
done some careful work to test a new methodology:

> http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/01/1218726110.full.pdf+html

It's interesting for people who follow those studies, but it's of
marginal value for ontology.

> Are all 23 of these words in Cyc?
>

> Does anyone know if these words are part of Anna Wierzbicka's vocabulary

> of primitives to some degree?

There is some overlap.  But the methodology and the purpose are so
different, that you're not likely to find anything useful.

Just look at the 23 words.  What would/could you get from them
that you couldn't get by some other methodology that would
probably be more useful?

See below.

John
_______________________________________________________________

Thou
I
Not
That
We
To give
Who
This
What
Man/male
Ye
Old
Mother
To hear
Hand
Fire
To pull
Black
To flow
Bark
Ashes
To spit
Worm

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