Practice question · Multiple choice
Why is a systematic sound correspondence better evidence of relatedness than a set of similar-looking words?
Hints
- Ask what a sceptic would say about any list of look-alike words.
- A regularity across thousands of items is not something chance supplies.
Show the answer
A. Chance and borrowing readily produce similar words, but not a correspondence holding across the whole vocabulary
Why
Because look-alikes are cheap. Any two languages supply a handful by chance, and borrowing supplies more. What chance does not supply is Latin p answering to English f throughout the vocabulary: a regularity across thousands of items, which is why the comparative method rests on correspondences rather than resemblances.
Practise A History of Linguistics
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