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So regular sound correspondence must be thrown out as an unfailing criterion too (of course, accepting that sound change is in principle regular, only disturbed by other factors such as analogy, still remains a vital precondition to ''any'' comparison, it just can't rule out borrowings entirely). Lexicon is just not reliable. As aptly pointed out in the article [[Trans–New Guinea languages]] (passage partly written by yours truly): ''The strongest lexical evidence for any language family is shared morphological paradigms, especially highly irregular or suppletive paradigms with bound morphology, because these are extremely resistant to borrowing. For example, if the only recorded German words were ''gut'' "good" and ''besser'' "better", that alone would be enough to demonstrate that in all probability German was related to English.'' --[[User:Florian Blaschke|Florian Blaschke]] ([[User talk:Florian Blaschke|talk]]) 22:36, 15 January 2016 (UTC)
See also [http://www.billposer.org/Papers/oerc.pdf "On the End of the Ritwan Controversy"], where Poser makes the same point again: lexical evidence is never sufficient to ''prove'' genetic relatedness; even isolated morphological comparisons are not enough. As he says on p. 7: "The distinction that Goddard made is the distinction widely made by historical linguists between lexical equations that happen to involve grammatical morphemes and true 'embedded' morphological correspondence." What must be compared is systems, not isolated forms. --[[User:Florian Blaschke|Florian Blaschke]] ([[User talk:Florian Blaschke|talk]]) 23:30, 15 January 2016 (UTC)
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