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by upquark 3380 days ago
It's just that the answer to the question posed in the headline is a definite 'no'. This type of silly inquiry into "is Azeri related to Sumerian", "is Georgian related to Chinese" etc. is very common in that part of the world, and is largely pseudo-scientific at its core.

As for ML methods, I know for a fact that modern Bayesian inference techniques have been successfully applied in comparative linguistics and proto-language reconstruction.

1 comments

>It's just that the answer to the question posed in the headline is a definite 'no'. This type of silly inquiry into "is Azeri related to Sumerian", "is Georgian related to Chinese" etc. is very common in that part of the world, and is largely pseudo-scientific at its core.

I should have made this clearer, but the 'question' I had in mind was not whether Basque is related to Georgian, but the more general one of whether it's related to anything at all.