[binrec]

> To tap into the core layers of language, Starostin’s team starts with an established list of core, universal concepts from the human experience. It includes meanings like “rock,” “fire,” “cloud,” "two,” “hand,” and “human,” amongst 110 total concepts.

In English, "rock" and "human" are loans and "cloud" is an innovative form.

> For Proto-Japonic, we introduce two distinctly different versions of the wordlist, since there are some significant unresolved problems in its reconstruction where adhering to one or the other solution influences the results of testing – namely, the reconstruction of Proto-Japonic by Sergei Starostin (1991), later adopted for the Altaic etymological dictionary (Starostin et al., 2003), posits an initial *d- for Proto-Japonic, whereas a more conservative approach prefers the phonetic interpretation of the same phoneme as *y- (Martin, 1987, gives no preference to either approach; both Vovin, 2005, and Robbeets, 2005, explicitly reject *d-; see Supplementary Material for details). Ultimately, we have to perform two sets of calculations because of these differences in interpretation of Proto-Japonic phonology.

There's no legitimate reason to follow Starostin here - that reconstruction is based on back-projection of an obviously secondary fortition specific to Yonaguni.