languagehat writes, over at metafilter: Yeah, this is complete bullshit. Actual linguists weigh in in this LH thread [ http://www.languagehat.com/archives/0049

languagehat writes, over at metafilter: Yeah, this is complete bullshit. Actual linguists weigh in in this LH thread [ http://www.languagehat.com/archives/004994.php http://www.languagehat.com/archives/004994.php ]; Marie-Lucie Tarpent writes: The article announces "Eurasiatic" (a hypothetical supergroup originally suggested by Joseph Greenberg of "Amerind" notoriety) as a major discovery by scientists (not linguists) but seems somewhat confused as to its relation with PIE. It also quotes a few words which the authors interpret as culturally too important to have been lost or replaced, so that they have lasted 15,000 years (one of these words is "bark" (of a tree) for which the authors propose an explanation). Like Renfrew and the Proto-World people, the authors do not seem to differentiate between the survival of a lexical item (although made unrecognizable through millennia of phonological changes) and the survival of the sounds that compose it (which are independent of the meaning of the whole word) (eg Renfrew et al thought that words for 'nephew' had endured almost unchanged for hundreds of years because of the importance of this concept, but actually this longevity is due to the fact that the consonants in the word had been more resistant to change than others, as shown by the behaviour of those consonants in other words totally unrelated semantically to 'nephew'). In any case, the article does not cite any actual forms, only meanings. Read it at your own risk. And Piotr Gąsiorowski says: This is exactly the kind of approach which makes wishful thinking look like science and gets it past reviewers. Even if the numerical methods are basically sound, the data are garbage (obtained by the intuitive eyeballing of reconstructions from the Tower of Babel database -- itself a highly questionable source -- without any actual comparative analysis). No different from ordinary "mass comparison", except perhaps for a tighter control of semantic matches. [...] I realise that one has to start somewhere, but mass comparison is at best of some help in formulating preliminary hypotheses, and mass comparison based on unreliable data is no use at all.