Numbers as "Core Vocabulary" (was IE "Urheimat" and evidencefrom Uralic ...

[Dr. John E. McLaughlin]

>> mclasutt at brigham.net writes:

>> Numbers are one of the very WORST things to look at in order to make even a
>> preliminary decision about relationship.

> -- they work fine with the Indo-European languages; in fact, they were
> crucial to the discovery of the IE family itself.  They work fairly well
> with Semitic, too.

I guess that my point is that they are NOT "core vocabulary" for the
purposes of comparative linguistics.  "Core vocabulary" must be relatively
universal in scope and numbers are definitely not.  They may work for
isolated language families (imagine saying that anything Indo-European is
atypical of language change! :-)), but overall they are to be avoided.  For
every Indo-European and Semitic in the world, there are ten Uto-Aztecans and
Siouans.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
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