long ranger

plural long rangers · alternative long-ranger

1. human sciencesA historical linguist engaged in search of long-range relationships among already established language families by comparing proto-languages.

   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.

   2002, Alexander Vovin, Building a 'Bum-pa for Sino-Caucasian, page 160

   2 more examples

   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.

   1993, N. N., Report on 2nd Comparative Workshop: Nostratic

   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.

   1995, Donald Ringe, Conference Report, Twelfth International Conference on Historical Linguistics