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jimrandomh comments on Are You a Solar Deity? - Less Wrong
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Your criticism of comparative linguistics is unfair, because the goal of comparative linguistics is not to determine whether two languages are related, but to measure a degree of relatedness. Comparative linguists try to find a set of transformations (from a list of transformation templates which have been observed to occur) which go from one language's phonology to the other's, where the size of that set is inversely proportional to relatedness, and a percentage of words in common. From these measures, linguists can make falsifiable predictions about how long societies have been isolated from each other, when works were written, and so on.
Okay. I don't know much about linguistics, so I accept your correction.
Would you call the people who are trying to determine whether Nostratic and Amerind are real families, or whether Basque is related to Caucasian languages, and those sorts of things "comparative linguists"? If not, what would you call them?