ABSTRACT
The establishment of a correct view of linguistic phylogeny is closely connected with the decisions that are made in applying comparative method (CM). Perhaps all people have stories about how the current diversity of languages came about, but many also tell a story about how different languages might be similar. In practice this means that we must examine a group of daughter languages with a recorded common quasi-ancestor, e.g. the Romance languages and Latin. The crucial factor that distinguishes genetic relationships of the type amenable to comparative reconstruction from other types of similarities that may be observed when comparing languages is regularity of correspondence. Perhaps the one area where the power and precision of CM has most increased in the poststructuralist period is in the analysis of directionality in sound change. If the regularity hypothesis is correct, then CM should in theory be universally applicable.
