W dniu 2012-04-01 15:03, Tavi pisze:
> I strongly disagree. IMHO the comparative method can be used to discover
> distant language relationships, in the scale of tens of thousand of
> years.
So what prevents you from demonstrating its application? On the one
hand, you promise a lot; on the other, you sound very evasive when asked
to back up your claims.
> I never said Vasco-Caucasian was a family but a MACRO-FAMILY, that is, a
> distant linguistic relationship.
Linguistic taxa, like other clades defined on the basis of shared
ancestry, are all of the same kind, irrespective of their time depth.
They consist of a most recent common ancestor plus all its descendants.
There are no other valid *genetic* groupings. It doesn't matter what you
call them -- a branch, a family, a macro-family or a super-mega-phylum.
A family is nothing special or privileged -- it's just a conventional
term for a linguistic clade whose wider relationships are obscure at the
current state of our knowledge. It's in fact our present ignorance that
defines it. If one day we demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that
Uralic and Indo-European (or Na-Dené and Sino-Tibetan, or whatever) are
related, we shall have combined two or more families into one (as has
happened before in several cases). If Basque and (NE?) Caucasian derive
from a common ancestor, they are by definition members of the same
clade. Either you can prove that by applying the comparative method in
the same way you would apply it to any "family", or you can't. So you
can't, can you?
Piotr