Pseudoscientific language comparison is a form of pseudo-scholarship that aims to establish historical associations between languages by naïve postulations of similarities between them. While comparative linguistics also studies how languages are historically related, linguistic comparisons are deemed pseudoscientific when they do not follow the established practices. Pseudoscientific language comparison is usually performed by people with little or no specialization in the field of comparative linguistics. It is a widespread type of linguistic pseudoscience. The most common method applied in pseudoscientific language comparisons is to search different languages for words that sound and mean alike. Such similarities often seem convincing to laymen, but linguistic scientists see this kind of comparison as unreliable for two primary reasons. First, the criterion of similarity is subjective and thus not subject to verification or falsification, which runs against scientific principles. Second, because there are so many words, it is easy to find coincidental similarities. Because of its lack of reliability, the method of searching for isolated similar words is rejected by nearly all comparative linguists (however, see mass comparison for a controversial method that operates by similarity). Instead, experts use the comparative method. This means that they search for consistent patterns between the languages' phonology, grammar and core vocabulary. This technique helps linguists to figure out whether the hypothesized relatedness really exists. Certain languages seem to get much more attention in pseudoscientific comparisons than others. These include languages of ancient civilizations such as Egyptian, Etruscan or Sumerian; language isolates or near-isolates such as Basque, Japanese and Ainu; and languages that are not related to their geographical neighbors such as Hungarian.
Political or religious implications Sometimes, languages are associated for political or religious reasons, despite a lack of support from accepted methods of science or historical linguistics. For example, it was argued by Niclas Wahlgren that Herman Lundborg encouraged that the posited Ural-Altaic or Turanian, language family, which seeks to relate Sami to the Mongolian language, was used to justify Swedish racism towards the Sami people in particular. (There are also strong, albeit areal not genetic, similarities between the Uralic, Turkic, and Mongolic languages, which provide a more benign but nonetheless incorrect basis for this theory.) Some believers in Abrahamic religions have sought to derive their native languages from Classical Hebrew. For example, Herbert W. Armstrong, a proponent of British Israelism, claimed that the word 'British' comes from Hebrew בְּרִית brit [bʁit] 'covenant' and אּישׁ ʾiš [iʃ] 'man', as supposed proof that the British people are the 'covenant people' of God. Pre-modern scholars of the Hebrew Bible, debating the language spoken by Adam and Eve, often relied on belief in the literal truth of Genesis and of the accuracy of the names transcribed therein. On the other hand, Renaissance scholars Johannes Goropius Becanus (1519–1572) and Simon Stevin argued that the Adamic language had been a dialect of their own native language, Dutch. The Sun Language Theory, positing a proto-Turkic language as the ancestor of all human languages, was motivated by Turkish nationalism. The Israeli-American linguist Paul Wexler is known for his fringe theories about the origin of Jewish populations and Jewish languages:
that most Ashkenazi Jews are of Turkic origin, and that their language, Yiddish, ultimately comes from Judaeo-Slavic that most Sephardi Jews are of Berber origin, as is their language, Ladino In the mid-1900s, The Lithuanian–American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas argued that Basque is clearly related to the extinct Pictish and Etruscan languages, even though at least the comparison had earlier been rejected within a decade of being proposed in 1892 by Sir John Rhys. She wanted to show Basque was a remnant of an "Old European culture".
Traits and characteristics
There is no universal way to spot pseudoscientific language comparisons. Indeed, such comparisons may not fit into one single category. However, the following characteristics tend to be more common among pseudoscientific theories (and the people who support them) than among scientific ones:
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