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<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Colleagues,</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">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? </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">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. </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">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). </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">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? </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">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?</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">John </FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"> </SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"></SPAN><A NAME=""><SPAN LANG="en-us">John Edward Terrell, PhD</SPAN></A></P>
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