Such similarities often seem convincing to common folks, but linguistic scientists see this kind of comparison as unreliable for two primary reasons.
Sometimes, languages are associated for political or religious reasons, despite a lack of support from accepted methods of science or historical linguistics.
[2] (There are also strong, albeit areal not genetic, similarities between the Uralic and Altaic languages, which provide a more benign but nonetheless incorrect basis for this theory.)[relevant?]
Pre-modern scholars of the Hebrew Bible, debating the language spoken by Adam and Eve, often relied on belief in the literal truth of Genesis and of the accuracy of the names transcribed therein.
The Israeli-American linguist Paul Wexler is known for his fringe theories[3][4] about the origin of Jewish populations and Jewish languages: In the mid-1900s, The Lithuanian–American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas argued that Basque is clearly related to the extinct Pictish and Etruscan languages, even though at least the comparison had earlier been rejected within a decade of being proposed in 1892 by Sir John Rhys.