long ranger

See also: long-ranger

English

Alternative forms

• long-ranger

Noun

long ranger (plural long rangers)

1. (linguistics) A historical linguist engaged in search of long-range relationships among already established language families by comparing proto-languages.
   • 1993, N. N., Report on 2nd Comparative Workshop: Nostratic‎^[1]:

     He thinks that long-rangers often use Pokorny's material uncritically ("fishing expeditions in Pokorny's") although it is considered to be dated in many respects by the modern state of Indo-European studies.

   • 1995, Donald Ringe, Conference Report, Twelfth International Conference on Historical Linguistics‎^[2]:

     Yes, all the long rangers, as far as I can tell, are not controlling for the possibility that the similarities between languages they are working on fall within the range of what one would expect by chance alone.

   • 2002, Alexander Vovin, Building a 'Bum-pa for Sino-Caucasian‎^[3], page 160:

     This painstaking process of checking texts and cultural data rather than dictionaries may seem to be not worth the candle for some (but not all) long-rangers.