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Some of the authors of the cited studies are associated with research on the purported Nostratic Language family, a highly speculative theory that is basically
by bluukinuk 5y ago
Some of the authors of the cited studies are associated with research on the purported Nostratic Language family, a highly speculative theory that is basically only held by a small school of russian linguists. Therefore, this should all be taken with a grain of salt. Macro families are in general highly disputed.
- binrec 5y agoIMO "macrofamily" isn't a well-defined enough concept not to be disputed by definition. Sino-Tibetan and Afroasiatic are very large and very old, but not as controversial as Altaic; Austro-Tai and Dene-Yeniseian are classic "macrofamilies" in that they're positing old relations between different established language families, but they're increasingly accepted, at least as promising lines of research. Lexical comparison isn't the standard for demonstrating language relatedness, though. Regular sound correspondences, morphological evidence, and commonalities in irregularities (e.g. English I/me ~ French je/moi or English good/better ~ German gut/besser) are ideal. Quantitative methods range from extremely preliminary to nonsense. This might be unfair of me, but IMO research from the Greenberg school (the Starostins, Bengtson, Ruhlen, etc.) or the automatic phylogeny school (List, the ASJP, etc.) can pretty much be ignored.