Comparing proto-language forms

A. Greenberg and Ruhlen deduce not from hundreds of languages together but from words in the proto-languages that have been deduced, like Proto-Indo-European, for each family. But even here, their conception of “similarity” leads to questions.

B. Here are 12 proto-language forms for water. Greenberg and Ruhlen reconstruct from these that the Proto-World form would have been *aq’wa.

Evidence for Proto-World aq’wa for water as reconstructed in 12 family proto-languages:

C. *ak^wā, *ak’^wa, and *‘oχ^wa are clearly similar, but they are from, respectively, Proto-Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and Caucasian. The problem is that these families all arose in regions close to one another— southern Russia, the Middle East, the Caucasus mountains. It is possible that these families share a common ancestor, then— but this is just three out of a great many families in the world. Their ancestor was not the world’s first language – it would have been one of legions of descendants of that first language.

D. *akwā is only the proto-form for Algonquian, but Greenberg and Ruhlen present it as a proto-form for most of the languages of North America. Beyond Algonquian, in assorted Native American languages, we find forms for water (and related meanings) as disparate as uk, yokha, ‘aha’, ku’u, iagup, uku-mi, and oxi’.