Amerind MALIQ’A ‘Swallow, Throat’ and Its Origin in the Old World

Probably the central myth of twentieth-century historical linguistics has been the belief that the comparative method is limited to a relatively short time depth—usually put at 5,000–10,000 years—beyond which all trace of genetic affinity has been erased by unrelenting waves of semantic and phonological change.* According to R. M. W. Dixon (1980: 237), “Generally, languages change at such a rate that after more than about three or four thousand years of separation genetic links are no longer recognizable.” James Matisoff puts the boundary at 6,000 years (Matisoff 1990: 108), Hans Hock (1986: 566) opts for 7,000 years, and Terrence Kaufman (1990: 23) would extend the limits to around 8,000 years: “A temporal ceiling of 7,000 to 8,000 years is inher- ent in the methods of comparative linguistic reconstruction. We can recover genetic relationships that are that old, but probably no earlier than that.” Fi- nally, according to Sarah Thomason (to appear), “10,000 years is the standard guess about the outer limits of the applicability of the Comparative Method.” Although one can only admire the precision these scholars have brought to determining the limits of comparative linguistics, one may legitimately ask what is the basis for this dating, whichever figure one chooses.