Second objection: Comparative reconstruction über alles

A. Language change specialists trace proto-language words by painstaking deduction along the lines that we saw with *snusos. But writing has existed for only a tiny fraction of the time that language has existed (6,000 years); we have no access to actual data to trace Proto-World words step by step backward. Instead, Greenberg and Ruhlen rely on a broader “eyeballing” technique.

B. Here are various words that lead them to reconstruct *tik as the first word for “one” or “finger.”

Evidence of Proto-World form *tik, “one, finger”:

C. Ruhlen objects that comparative reconstruction is not a necessary condition for establishing a relationship between languages:

Were a biologist to demand a complete reconstruction of Proto-Mammal, together with a complete explanation of how this creature evolved into every living mammal, before he would accept the fact that human beings are related to cats and bats, he would not be taken seriously. Yet it is just this kind of linguistic nonsense that has been taught in universities by Indo-Europeanists for so long that most linguists are unaware of its mythological nature.