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Lydia Leftcoast

(48,217 posts)
2. Barring the development of a time machine, the comparative method
Sat Feb 18, 2012, 10:48 PM
Feb 2012

and internal reconstruction can take us back only about 5,000 years, and they work only if there are closely related languages available. If a language has no documented "relatives," it's much harder.

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