The offered compilation is a look at randomly selected basic words, or rather notions, that builds on the canonical Swadesh list: Proto-FU or Ugor, Sumerian (& Akkad), Dravidian (mostly Tamil), Etruscan, Keltic-Old Irish, Hungarian, Turkic, Outlying Asian, Egypt, American Indians, Proto-IE. It provides a more solid statistical base for better accuracy and more sure-footed results for wherever they fall. The greatly expanded base compensates for many shortcomings of the Swadesh list, including ambiguity of terms and a slant to idiosyncrasies of the English language. The compilation is a work in progress, subject to tweaks and open to suggestions.

The compilation is not an answer to any question. Rather, it raises questions about validity of the common postulates, of the motifs and beliefs behind common postulates, and the forces that shaped them. As a listing of nonsubjective facts, it does not favor any dogma, registering instead that the crannies of the long promulgated linguistic assertions contain more material confronting them than the material supporting them. As is usually a case with paleology, the finds are more connected with who wields the shovel than what the extracted material sings.

Nostratic theory attempted to explain lexical commonalities found among diverse and patently incompatible languages and linguistic groups. The traces are tangible, but the premise of Family Tree was fictional, so the theoretical deductions were colliding with observations at every turn. An alternate approach was based on the typology of languages, on the commonality of their morphological and syntactic properties and other aspects besides lexical. Once again, the traces are tangible, but the Family Tree premise was fictional, so the theoretical inferences were colliding with observations. Dilemma prompted an invention of a linguistic Wave Model, which is an abandonment of the Family Tree model, or at least serious modifications of its premises. As purely linguistic models, theories needed lots of equilibristics to buttress their premises. Like the manifestations of invisible wind, the observations were extremely tangible, but the mental inertia confined linguists and their models to stationarity, while the nature, and the language as a part of nature, is a dynamic beast. Even before the domestication of the horse, the dynamism of the human trunks colonized five continents and numerous archipelagos; with the domestication of the horse the pace of demographical and linguistic dynamism only increased exponentially. What in a primitive pedestrian world was a gradual dispersion over many generations turned into cataclysmic waves that could invisibly roll over great distances and funnel into smashing transformations. Distant peoples and languages found themselves submerged into local substrates, amalgamated with aboriginals, or dominated indigenes. The fast processes superimposed on the slower evolution fragmented continuous Sprachbunds into into clusters of islands that required new lingua francas to function. The lingua francas evolved, unfolded, and collapsed. Enter a linguist, who observes a landscape of built-up world, with finished structures. One theory says that a linguistic city block was built entirely by decedents of a single clan, with minor embellishments contributed by close neighbors. The other theory says that a linguistic city is a frozen result of supplanting waves superimposed one over the other. Another theory sees finished structures compiled of pieces of older structures compiled of pieces of still older structures, some parts of remote origin and some of very remote origin.

The advent of genetics and its capability to detect and date primal and prehistoric human migrations cardinally changed the blurred picture envisioned at the beginning of the 20th c. Linguistics, and in particular the Indo-European linguistics, impressed with its own superiority, has been little perturbed, insisting on its own narratives, and advocating minor remedies to its own postulates to mitigate mounting conflicts with the natural sciences of the physical world. The ghost of the Noah ark still pervades the linguistic field, a tacit acknowledgement of a need to scrap the outdated premises and their results is still in waiting, providing an opening for dissidents and sneerers.