Bantu languages

[Ross Clark (FOA DALSL)]

The full reference is Proc. R.Soc. Lond. B (2002) 269, 793-799. Although 25
March is given at the top of the paper as the date of online publication,
the *issue* date is 22 April. This may save some time in finding the paper.

Ross Clark

-----Original Message-----
From: terrell at fmnh.org [mailto:terrell at fmnh.org]
Sent: Saturday, 28 September 2002 5:44 a.m.
To: AUSTRONESIAN LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS
Subject: Bantu languages



Colleagues,

Is there anyone on this list who has read Clare Holden's recent paper in the
Proc. Roy. Soc (25 March 2002) with whom a colleague and I may compare
notes?

We are intrigued that Holden reports using cognate sets as character states.
On the face of it, this would seem to be a strategy that falls between
stools: what she reports doing, it would seem, is neither numerical taxonomy
(lexicostatistics), nor cladistics.

Her data set is a 92 item subset of Swadesh's famous 100-word list.  Yet she
reports using the cladistics program PAUP 4.0 to analyze this data set-a
program written to be used instead on character tables, i.e., tables of
derived character states (what, in linguistics, we call shared innovations).


Her paper shows that one can get results of a sort using this kind of hybrid
strategy (Holden points out, in fact, that her results are strikingly
similar to those obtained by others using lexicostatistics!), but isn't this
a case of looking through a glass darkly?

Specifically, aren't results obtained using this mixed strategy going to be
highly constrained/strongly determined by the underlying distribution of
shared innovations across the particular sample of words used?

John

John Edward Terrell, PhD

Field Museum, 1400 S. Lake Shore Dr.

Chicago, IL 60606

312-665-7822



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/an-lang/attachments/20020928/8007b245/attachment.htm>