I second Emanuel's motion for thread cloture. As I recollect, the original
query was by some language-interested person in Turkey. He or she either
got, or didn't get, pointers to literature. We have _other_fish_to_fry_.
In part, this listserv is about language preservation, recovery, even (goD
forfend!) expansion. Of Indigenous (implicitly) endangered languages, to
which millenia archaic languages are rather tangentially interesting, and
of ZIPPO USE to the million of so indigenous of the North Americas working
to keep or acquire one or more indigenous-to-the-Americas languages.
Further, since aside from the circumpolar settlement, linguistic separation
occurred between 4k BCE and 20k BCE, possibly over multiple event horizons,
unless this is a topic _tied_ to New World Archaeology, it is close to
incomprehensibly theoretical/nonsensical, and risks (greatly) being some
vehicle for Fellian hyperdiffusionists who will dance about with bogus
phoneme correspondences, or the discovery that Rome is in New York.
Such threads belong in linguistics forums, where the bogus can be delt with
by scholars. I sincerely doubt if the overwhelming majority of nat-lang
subscribers are remotely interested in linguistics in the abstract as they
are in language -- teaching it, learning it, expanding the use of it.
Kitakitamatsinopowaw (I'll see you again)
-- Eric Brunner
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Comments from NativeNet listowner, Gary Trujillo (gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us):
Historically, NAT-LANG has largely been a scholarly discussion forum, and
is populated by numerous scholars of language. I see nothing wrong with
this fact, nor are scholarly dialogues necessarily incompatible with a
certain number of more informal discussions.