Pseudoscientific language comparison is a form of pseudo-scholarship that aims to establish historical associations between languages by naïve postulations of similarities between them. While comparative linguistics also studies how languages are historically related, linguistic comparisons are deemed pseudoscientific when they do not follow the established practices. Pseudoscientific language comparison is usually performed by people with little or no specialization in the field of comparative linguistics. It is a widespread type of linguistic pseudoscience. The most common method applied in pseudoscientific language comparisons is to search different languages for words that sound and mean alike. Such similarities often seem convincing to common folks, but linguistic scientists see this kind of comparison as unreliable for two primary reasons. First, the criterion of similarity is subjective and thus not subject to verification or falsification, which runs against scientific principles. Second, because there are so many words, it is easy to find coincidental similarities. Because of its lack of reliability, the method of searching for isolated similar words is rejected by nearly all comparative linguists (however, see mass comparison for a controversial method that operates by similarity). Instead, experts use the

comparative method In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards ...

. This means that they search for consistent patterns between the languages'

phonology Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...

grammar In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rul ...

and core vocabulary. This technique helps linguists to figure out whether the hypothesized relatedness really exists. Certain languages seem to get much more attention in pseudoscientific comparisons than others. These include languages of ancient civilizations such as Egyptian, Etruscan or Sumerian; language isolates or near-isolates such as

Basque Basque may refer to: * Basques, an ethnic group of Spain and France * Basque language, their language Places * Basque Country (greater region), the homeland of the Basque people with parts in both Spain and France * Basque Country (autonomous co ...

, Japanese and Ainu; and languages that are not related to their geographical neighbors such as Hungarian.

Political or religious implications

Sometimes, languages are associated for political or religious reasons, despite a lack of support from accepted methods of

science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...

historical linguistics Historical linguistics, also known as diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of how languages change over time. It seeks to understand the nature and causes of linguistic change and to trace the evolution of languages. Historical li ...

. For example, it was argued by Niclas Wahlgren that Herman Lundborg encouraged that the posited Ural-Altaic or Turanian, language family, which seeks to relate

Sami Acronyms * SAMI, ''Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange'', a closed-captioning format developed by Microsoft * Saudi Arabian Military Industries, a government-owned defence company * South African Malaria Initiative, a virtual expertise ne ...

to the

Mongolian language Mongolian is the Prestige (sociolinguistics), principal language of the Mongolic languages, Mongolic language family that originated in the Mongolian Plateau. It is spoken by ethnic Mongols and other closely related Mongolic peoples who are nati ...

, was used to justify Swedish racism towards the Sami people in particular. (There are also strong, albeit areal not genetic, similarities between the Uralic and Altaic languages, which provide a more benign but nonetheless incorrect basis for this theory.) Some believers in

Abrahamic religions The term Abrahamic religions is used to group together monotheistic religions revering the Biblical figure Abraham, namely Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The religions share doctrinal, historical, and geographic overlap that contrasts them wit ...

have sought to derive their native languages from

Classical Hebrew Biblical Hebrew ( or ), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, a language in the Canaanitic branch of the Semitic languages spoken by the Israelites in the area known as the Land of Israel, roughly west of ...

. For example, Herbert W. Armstrong, a proponent of British Israelism, claimed that the word 'British' comes from Hebrew and , as supposed proof that the British people are the 'covenant people' of God. Pre-modern scholars of the

Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
. '' language spoken by Adam and Eve, often relied on belief in the literal truth of Genesis and of the accuracy of the names transcribed therein. On the other hand,

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) is a Periodization, period of history and a European cultural movement covering the 15th and 16th centuries. It marked the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and was characterized by an effort to revive and sur ...

scholars Johannes Goropius Becanus (1519–1572) and Simon Stevin argued that the Adamic language had been a dialect of their own native language, Dutch. The Sun Language Theory, positing a proto- Turkic language as the ancestor of all human languages, was motivated by Turkish nationalism. The Israeli-American linguist Paul Wexler is known for his fringe theories about the origin of Jewish populations and

Jewish languages Jewish languages are the various languages and dialects that developed in Jewish communities in the Jewish diaspora, diaspora. The original Jewish language is Hebrew, supplanted as the primary vernacular by Aramaic following the Babylonian capti ...

: * that most

Ashkenazi Jews Ashkenazi Jews ( ; also known as Ashkenazic Jews or Ashkenazim) form a distinct subgroup of the Jewish diaspora, that emerged in the Holy Roman Empire around the end of the first millennium CE. They traditionally speak Yiddish, a language ...

are of Turkic origin, and that their language,

Yiddish Yiddish, historically Judeo-German, is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated in 9th-century Central Europe, and provided the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with ...

, ultimately comes from Judaeo-Slavic * that most

Sephardi Jews Sephardic Jews, also known as Sephardi Jews or Sephardim, and rarely as Iberian Peninsular Jews, are a Jewish diaspora population associated with the historic Jewish communities of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) and their descendant ...

are of

Berber Berber or Berbers may refer to: Ethnic group * Berbers, an ethnic group native to Northern Africa * Berber languages, a family of Afro-Asiatic languages Places * Berber, Sudan, a town on the Nile People with the surname * Ady Berber (1913–196 ...

origin, as is their language, Ladino In the mid-1900s, The

Lithuania Lithuania, officially the Republic of Lithuania, is a country in the Baltic region of Europe. It is one of three Baltic states and lies on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, bordered by Latvia to the north, Belarus to the east and south, P ...

n–American

archaeologist Archaeology or archeology is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of Artifact (archaeology), artifacts, architecture, biofact (archaeology), biofacts or ecofacts, ...

Marija Gimbutas argued that Basque is clearly related to the extinct Pictish and Etruscan languages, even though at least the comparison had earlier been rejected within a decade of being proposed in 1892 by Sir John Rhys. She wanted to show Basque was a remnant of an " Old European culture".See

Traits and characteristics

There is no universal way to spot pseudoscientific language comparisons. Indeed, such comparisons may not fit into one single category. However, the following characteristics tend to be more common among pseudoscientific theories (and the people who support them) than among scientific ones: *Failure to apply an accepted, or at least systematic, method to show regular correspondences between the languages. Unsystematic comparisons are effectively unfalsifiable. *Failure to present grammatical evidence for relatedness: claims are based exclusively on word comparisons, even though in comparative linguistics grammatical evidence is also needed to confirm relatedness. *Arbitrary segmentation of compared forms: comparisons are based on the similarity of only a part of the words compared (usually the first syllable), while the rest of the word is ignored. *Disregard for the effects of morphology on word structure: uninflected

root In vascular plants, the roots are the plant organ, organs of a plant that are modified to provide anchorage for the plant and take in water and nutrients into the plant body, which allows plants to grow taller and faster. They are most often bel ...

forms may be compared with fully inflected forms, or marked forms may be used in preference to lesser- or unmarked forms. *Not thinking about borrowing and areal features. Neighboring languages may share much vocabulary and many grammatical features due to

language contact Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact with and influence each other. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. Language contact can occur at language borders, between adstratum ...

. To really know whether the similarities result from contact or from relatedness, we need to use the

adequately. *Relying on typological similarities between languages: the morphological type of the language is claimed to provide evidence for relatedness, but in comparative linguistics only material parallels are accepted as evidence of a historical connection. *Neglect of known history: present-day forms of words are used in comparisons, neglecting either the attested or the reconstructed history of the language in question, or words of varying time depths (such as current, archaic, and reconstructed words) and reliability of reconstruction are used interchangeably. *Advocation of geographically far-fetched connections, such as comparing Finnish (in

Finland Finland, officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It borders Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bothnia to the west and the Gulf of Finland to the south, ...

) to Quechua (in

Peru Peru, officially the Republic of Peru, is a country in western South America. It is bordered in the north by Ecuador and Colombia, in the east by Brazil, in the southeast by Bolivia, in the south by Chile, and in the south and west by the Pac ...

), or

(in

Spain Spain, or the Kingdom of Spain, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe with territories in North Africa. Featuring the Punta de Tarifa, southernmost point of continental Europe, it is the largest country in Southern Eur ...

and

France France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...

) to Ainu (in

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

), or Tamil (in India) to Korean (in Korea). This criterion is only suggestive, though, as a long distance does not exclude the possibility of a relationship: English is demonstrably related to

Hindi Modern Standard Hindi (, ), commonly referred to as Hindi, is the Standard language, standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of India, official language of the Government ...

(in

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

), and Hawaiian to Malagasy (on

Madagascar Madagascar, officially the Republic of Madagascar, is an island country that includes the island of Madagascar and numerous smaller peripheral islands. Lying off the southeastern coast of Africa, it is the world's List of islands by area, f ...

). *Advocacy of fanciful narratives based on the purported linguistic findings, e.g. claims of unknown civilizations or ancient people traveling across oceans. Proponents of pseudoscientific language comparisons also tend to share some common characteristics with cranks in other fields of science: * Overestimation of their own knowledge or competence in one or more of the languages under comparison, or their historical development, and underestimation of experts' knowledge. For example, assigning of incorrect meanings to words or sentences, quoting of rare or even fake

lexeme A lexeme () is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning, a unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms ta ...

s, morphs or meanings or of obscure dialect forms, misinterpretation of what experts have written, or ignorance of important facts. When forms and meanings are simply compiled and quoted from dictionaries (or even only a single source), inaccuracies creep in very easily. Even linguistically trained native speakers may not be experts in their own language, its dialectology, and its history; and even professional linguists may not be experts in large numbers of diverse languages and families. *Claims that the purported remote linguistic relationship is clear. A distant relationship between languages is usually not obvious on a superficial examination, and can only be uncovered via a successful application of the

. *Failure to submit results to

peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (:wiktionary:peer#Etymology 2, peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the ...

ed linguistic journals. *Assertion that people who criticize the theory are just stuck in old ways, have ideological motivations, or are part of a secret plan by the language experts.

Notes

References

* * *{{cite book , title=Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship: An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics , last1=Hock , first1=Hans Henrich , last2=Joseph , first2=Brian D. , year=1996 , publisher=Mouton de Gruyter , location=Berlin; New York , isbn=978-3-11-014784-1

External links

How likely are chance resemblances between languages?
Language comparison Pseudolinguistics

Political or religious implications

Traits and characteristics

See also

Notes

References

External links