Prospects of a ,,Papuan” comparative linguistics

English heart will never mean mutual intelligibility even if they numbered more than 81 %. [...]it could be maintained that of Swadesh's 97 word test list only 17 English words do not have a straight agreement with Dutch, viz. bark, belly, big, black, cloud, die, meat, road, root, skin, smoke, snake, stab, tail, tree, walk and wing; at least if we compare Eng. leaf with the more or, less "stilish" but perfectly good Du. loof instead of everyday Du. blad, Eng. many with Du. menig instead of Du.veel which are both normal, and Eng. heavy with Du. hevig instead of swaar (Eng. thou is almost obsolete in English and quite lost in Dutch). If for some reason or other this possibility does not exist, it is obvious that false conclusions are easily made without our knowing them to be false. [...]even in Malay, whose traceable foreign admixture is mostly due to cultural borrwing from Sanskrit, Arabic, Portuguese, Dutch and English, at least 7 words of the non-cultural 97 word list are Sanskrit loanwords or (the last one) comparable to Skr. words, viz. semua, "all"; mega, "cloud" (but also awan); kepala, "head";. nama, "name"; kata or bicara, "say"; biji, "seed" (Skr. wijd); and dua, "two". According to Swadesh, "five percent is usually considered a.safe limit between the uncertain and the scientifically reliable. [...]even if one disregarded the cases which have one or the other and included only the languages which have both n and m for first and second person respectively, and if one holds to the restriction that both forms must belong to the same functional type whether independent pronoun or subject, object or possessive affixes the list of language groups would still be fairly impressive."