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Right. It's a tantalizing hypothesis. My gut feeling is that it is likely at least a few of the identified language families (particularly Turkish and Mongoli
by retrac 5y ago
Right. It's a tantalizing hypothesis. My gut feeling is that it is likely at least a few of the identified language families (particularly Turkish and Mongolic and Korean) are related. But this simply has never been demonstrated by anyone adequately to make a scientific claim. A hunch at best. There just isn't enough data. There probably will never be.
As soon as you add even slight fuzziness in what constitutes a valid match, given you're dealing with thousands of words in hundreds of forms... and you're matching all of them against each other, the search space explodes and you start finding matches. Dozens. Hundreds even.
A great article by programmer, amateur linguist and imaginary world creator Mark Rosenfelder goes into this in some detail: http://zompist.com/chance.htm http://zompist.com/chance.htm "How likely are chance resemblances between languages?" (Quite likely!)
- georgecmu 5y agoI think this review [1] put it best: It goes without saying that an etymological dictionary of a non-existing language family is a paradoxon, to say the least. One possible way out of this is of course the conclusion that the family is after all real and that the existence of a work like this is the best proof of this fact. On the other hand, a quite different conclusion would be that there could after all be such a thing as a full scale 3-volume lexical reconstruction of a proto-language, which indeed never existed. The full scale 3-volume lexical reconstruction of a proto-language, which indeed never existed can be downloaded here.[2]. [1] https://www.academia.edu/1629982/Review_of_Sergei_Starostin_Anna_Dybo_and_Oleg_Mudrak_eds._Etymological_Dictionary_of_the_Altaic_Languages_2003_ https://www.academia.edu/1629982/Review_of_Sergei_Starostin_... [2] http://s155239215.onlinehome.us/turkic/40_Language/Starostinetymological_dictionary_of_altaic_languages.pdf http://s155239215.onlinehome.us/turkic/40_Language/Starostin...
- ummonk 5y agoIt’s not hard to create a fake protolanguage by focusing on borrowed terms and accidental cognates.