Refining early Basque criteria

[Larry Trask]

Pat Ryan writes:

[on Basque <ama> 'mother']

>  I continue to believe that some terms which might be classified as
>  Kinderlallsprache such as <ama> are a powerful indication of common
>  linguistic descent; and should not be excluded from consideration of
>  inclusion in Pre-Basque.

>  It may be that this category of terms has preserved an older or non-typical
>  phonological form than other words of the vocabulary but they should be
>  seriously considered because of their ubiqiuity.

No.  Their ubiquity is *precisely* the reason why they should be excluded.
After all, in most of the languages on the planet, the word for a cat-noise is
something like <miau>, but this ubiquity is not an argument for pushing the
word back to Pre-Proto-Everything.  Rather, it is a compelling argument for
disregarding the word altogether, on grounds of *motivated* independent
creation.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk