Is it possible to verify the genetic taxa of world languages by typological methods?

[Søren Wichmann]

This paper gives a qualitative answer
Polyakov, Vladimir N., Valery D. Solovyev, Søren Wichmann, and Oleg 
Belyaev. 2009. Using WALS and Jazyki Mira. Linguistic Typology 13: 135-165.
There is a prepublication version here:
http://email.eva.mpg.de/~wichmann/Comparing%20WALS%20and%20Jazyki%20Mira%20Final.pdf

The short answer is: yes, languages can be genealogically classified by 
means of typological data, but it takes a lot of such data to get an 
accurate classification.

Søren.

Yuri Tambovtsev wrote:
> Dear colleagues in the field of typology, I wonder if it is possible to 
> verify the genetic taxa of world languages by typological methods? For 
> instance, let us take Finno-Ugric language family and analyse it with 
> the help of the total of the distances between its members and then 
> compare this total to the total distance between the Turkic language 
> family. If Finno-Ugric distance total is greater then that of the Turkic 
> one, it means that Finno-Ugric languages are less similar to each 
> other than the Turkic languages. We took nine phonetic features and 
> found out that Turkic language family has a smaller distance total. 
> Thus, we can say that it is more compact on the phonetic level. It means 
> that Turkic languages are more similar phonetically. So, we can say that 
> the genetic taxon of the Turkic languages has been verified by the 
> typological methods. What do you think about that? Looking forward to 
> hearing from you to yutamb at mail.ru <mailto:yutamb at mail.ru>  Yours 
> sincerely Yuri Tambovtsev