Re: Does every language family contain one with "ma-" "da-" "ta-" words for parents?

 I missed the bit at the bottom where you were talking about disputed
isolates. But it seems to me that by that criterion we can pretty much
dismiss all counter examples, since for every isolate out there some
nutter has proposed that it is related to another language with little
real evidence. I think this question is probably unanswerable in the
absolute sense, since I doubt that we'll ever all agree on all the
links, given that good reconstruction can only really go back so far,
and without reconstruction lexical item similarities can be explained
away by chance or borrowing at some point.
 I also question the value of the proposed universal. What value is
there in claiming that a member of every language family has such a set
of words? I simply don't see how it advances our knowledge of
language... if what we want to say is that most languages contain such
pairs of words, then why not simply phrase it that way and ignore
genetic relations when doing the study? Unless, of course, we're trying
to prove some barmy proto-world theory (forgive me for not having read
what led up to this post), but in that case I don't see why we're
insisting that every family must contain such words. There are plenty of
PIE words, for example, that are attested in many but by no means all of
the descendents of PIE, so we don't need a cognate from every single
language family for that purpose.

>> A "ta-" word is or begins with "ta-" or
>> "ata-" or "tVta-" where V is a vowel.
>>
>>