Theory of Mass Comparison
Mass comparison involves setting up a table of basic vocabulary items and their forms in the languages to be compared. The table can also include common morphemes. The following table was used by Greenberg (1957, p. 41) to illustrate the technique. It shows the forms of six items of basic vocabulary in nine different languages, identified by letters.
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Head | kar | kar | se | kal | tu | tu | to | fi | pi |
| Eye | min | ku | min | miŋ | min | aš | min | idi | iri |
| Nose | tor | tör | ni | tol | was | waš | was | ik | am |
| One | mit | kan | kan | kaŋ | ha | kan | kεn | he | čak |
| Two | ni | ta | ne | kil | ne | ni | ne | gum | gun |
| Blood | kur | sem | sem | šam | i | sem | sem | fik | pix |
The basic relationships can be determined without any experience in the case of languages that are fairly closely related. Knowing a bit about probable paths of sound change allows one to go farther faster. An experienced typologist — Greenberg was a pioneer in the field — can quickly recognize or reject several potential cognates in this table as probable or improbable. For example, the path p > f is extremely frequent, the path f > p much less so, enabling one to hypothesize that fi : pi and fik : pix are indeed related and go back to protoforms *pi and *pik/x, while knowledge that k > x is extremely frequent, x > k much less so enables one to choose *pik over *pix. Thus, while mass comparison does not attempt to produce reconstructions of protolanguages — according to Greenberg (2005:318) these belong to a later phase of study — phonological considerations come into play from the very beginning.
The tables used in actual research involve much larger numbers of items and languages. The items included may be either lexical, such as 'hand', 'sky', and 'go', or morphological, such as PLURAL and MASCULINE (Ruhlen 1987, p. 120).
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