Others suspect Atkinson's analytical approach could be fruitful if informed by more sophisticated assumptions about how languages change. "I think many linguists would praise Atkinson's contribution if it weren't for the fact that his conclusions are so outlandish and contrary to linguistic intuition," says linguist Michael Cysouw of Ludwig Maximilians University Munich in Germany. One problem lies in Atkinson's focus on frequencies of only one linguistic element, phonemes, to retrace language evolution. "That could be compared to tracking the history of vertebrates by counting the number of bones in their skeletons," Cysouw says. The database of phonemes consulted by Atkinson...