Data
False positives
Universals
- The fact that words for “mother” have a characteristic [m] sound, as in Chinese mu or Dravidian amma, doesn’t prove that the languages have a common origin, nor that one language borrowed the word from another, only that babies at their mother’s breast make the same sound everywhere.
Loan words
- Japanese biiru, garasu and karan sound like Dutch bier (beer), glas (glass) and kraan (watertap) not because the languages share an ancient common origin but because Japanese borrowed the Dutch words during the colonial age.
Coincidence
- similarities based on pure coincidence, e.g. in the case of Japanese namae and its English counterpart name, words which have a distinct history in Japanese c.q. Indo-European.