Editing Mass comparison (section)

=== Response of Greenberg's defenders ===

The actual development of the comparative method was a more gradual process than Greenberg's detractors suppose. It has three decisive moments. The first was [[Rasmus Christian Rask|Rasmus Rask]]'s observation in 1818 of a possible regular sound change in Germanic consonants. The second was [[Jacob Grimm]]'s extension of this observation into a general principle ([[Grimm's law]]) in 1822. The third was [[Karl Verner]]'s resolution of an irregularity in this sound change ([[Verner's law]]) in 1875. Only in 1861 did [[August Schleicher]], for the first time, present systematic reconstructions of Indo-European proto-forms (Lehmann 1993:26). Schleicher, however, viewed these reconstructions as extremely tentative (1874:8). He never claimed that they proved the existence of the Indo-European family, which he accepted as a given from previous research—primarily that of [[Franz Bopp]], his great predecessor in Indo-European studies.

[[Karl Brugmann]], who succeeded Schleicher as the leading authority on Indo-European, and the other [[Neogrammarian]]s of the late 19th century, distilled the work of these scholars into the famous (if often disputed) principle that "every sound change, insofar as it occurs automatically, takes place according to laws that admit of no exception" (Brugmann 1878).<ref>{{cite web |last=Lehmann |first=Winfred P. |url=http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/books/read14.html |title=A Reader in Nineteenth Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics: Preface to 'Morphological Investigations in the Sphere of the Indo-European Languages' I |publisher=Utexas.edu |date=2007-03-20 |access-date=2012-03-11 |archive-date=2012-08-05 |archive-url=https://archive.today/20120805232443/http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/books/read14.html |url-status=dead }}</ref>

The Neogrammarians did not, however, regard regular sound correspondences or comparative reconstructions as relevant to the proof of genetic relationship between languages. In fact, they made almost no statements on how languages are to be classified (Greenberg 2005:158). The only Neogrammarian to deal with this question was [[Berthold Delbrück]], Brugmann's collaborator on the ''[[Grundriß der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen]]'' (Greenberg 2005:158-159, 288). According to Delbrück (1904:121-122, quoted in Greenberg 2005:159), Bopp had claimed to prove the existence of Indo-European in the following way:

:The proof was produced by juxtaposing words and forms of similar meanings. When one considers that in these languages the formation of the inflectional forms of the verb, noun and pronoun agrees in essentials and likewise that an extraordinary number of inflected words agree in their lexical parts, the assumption of chance agreement must appear absurd.

Furthermore, Delbrück took the position later enunciated by Greenberg on the priority of etymologies to sound laws (1884:47, quoted in Greenberg 2005:288): "obvious etymologies are the material from which sound laws are drawn."

The opinion that sound correspondences or, in another version of the opinion, reconstruction of a proto-language are necessary to show relationship between languages thus dates from the 20th, not the 19th century, and was never a position of the Neogrammarians. Indo-European was recognized by scholars such as [[William Jones (philologist)|William Jones]] (1786) and Franz Bopp (1816) long before the development of the comparative method.

Furthermore, Indo-European was not the first language family to be recognized by students of language. [[Semitic languages|Semitic]] had been recognized by European scholars in the 17th century, [[Finno-Ugric languages|Finno-Ugric]] in the 18th. [[Dravidian languages|Dravidian]] was recognized in the mid-19th century by [[Robert Caldwell]] (1856), well before the publication of Schleicher's comparative reconstructions.

Finally, the supposition that all of the language families generally accepted by linguists today have been established by the comparative method is untrue. Some families were accepted for decades before comparative reconstructions of them were put forward, for example [[Afro-Asiatic languages|Afro-Asiatic]] and [[Sino-Tibetan languages|Sino-Tibetan]]. Many languages are generally accepted as belonging to a language family even though no comparative reconstruction exists, often because the languages are only attested in fragmentary form, such as the [[Anatolian languages|Anatolian]] language [[Lydian language|Lydian]] (Greenberg 2005:161). Conversely, detailed comparative reconstructions exist for some language families which nonetheless remain controversial, such as [[Altaic languages#Comparative grammar of the proposed Altaic language family|Altaic]]. Detractors of Altaic point out that the data collected to show by comparativism the existence of the family is scarce, wrong and non sufficient. Keep in mind that regular phonological correspondences need thousands of lexicon lists to be prepared and compared before being established, and these lists are lacking for many of the proposed  families identified through mass comparison. Furthermore, other specific problems affect "comparative" lists of both proposals, like the late attestation for Altaic languages, or the comparison of not certain proto-forms.<ref name="test1">[[R.L. Trask]], Historical Linguistics (1996), chapters 8 to 13 for an intensive lookout on language comparison.</ref><ref name="test2">Claudia A. Ciancaglini, [https://www.torrossa.com/gs/resourceProxy?an=2402691&publisher=F34885 "How to prove genetic relationships among languages: the cases of Japanese and Corean"], 2005, "La Sapienza" University, Rome</ref>