🚀 go-pugleaf

	OK, you guys, get ready to point your flamethrowers at
Scientific American, because SciAm just published (Nov. issue) an
article by Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen describing their
proposed Amerind family.

	Much of their article is devoted to discussing some of the
correspondences they have found; they focus on Amerind, though they do
perform comparisons to Nostratic/Eurasiatic and Sino-Caucasian toward
the end. They are silent about Proto-World (fortunately!).

	They do acknowledge their rejection by much of the linguistic
community, but they state that their critics have no better ideas.

	They also criticize many mainstream linguists for doing
two-at-a-time comparisons, which they compare to working out
Indo-European by comparing English and Albanian. Given the way
Indo-European was actually worked out, with multiple comparisons, that
criticism would seem justified.

	In his book _Language in the Americas_, JG makes an example of
comparing Irish and Armenian; if one looked only at those two, would a
relationship between them be very apparent? It is the knowlege of the
other IE languages that helped establish their relationship, which is
effectively constructed from:

	Irish -- (other IE)
	Armenian -- (other IE)

	Since the quality of relatedness is transitive, we find,
though indirectly,

	Irish -- Armenian

	However, they did not pay much attention to the question of
the sort of precise sound correspondences that the more mainstream of
comparative linguists, and even the Nostraticists, hope to discover.

	OK, now, fire away :-):-)