stats on vocab coincidences?

[manaster at umich.edu]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
This was done by Bender, Marvin L.
        1969            Chance CVC Correspondences in Unrelated Languages.
Language 45:519-531.
 
I was able to use his results to produce a new argument for the
validity of the connection, often denied, between Haida and the
other Nadene languages in my paper
 
Sapir's classifications: Nadene.  Anthropological  Linguistics 38:1-38
(1996).
 
I don't how robust Bender's findings are (that is, how they fare
if one does the same statistics on other languages than the ones
he did or if one varies the 100-word pseudo-Swadesh list he used).
Hence, I do not know whether the argument is a very strong one.
I of course have other arguments for Haida-Nadene, so this does
not concern me too much, but still I would be interested in any
other references to this subject.
 
One other thing of relevance: In William Baxter and AMR, Review of Donald
Ringe (1992).  Diachronica 13:371-389 (1996), we show that there are
pairs of related languages which have fewer matches of initial consonants
than is the case in some pairs of unrelated languages.  This does not
deal with the general problem of spurious matches, because it is
is restricted to one position only, but on the other hand,
we consider not just phonetically similar consonants but all
possible correspondences in this one position.
 
A.
 
 
On Mon, 27 Apr 1998, Steven Schaufele wrote:
 
> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> Dear fellow historical linguists,
>
> If memory serves, two or three years ago somebody did some sort of
> statistical study on the odds of vocabulary correspondences occurring
> between any two languages purely by chance.  Does anybody remember what
> the results of this study were, or where i could find out?  I'm in the
> middle of a struggle to enlighten someone trying to argue for
> Hebrew-English affiliation purely on the basis of lexical coincidences.
>
> Best,
> Steven
> --
> Steven Schaufele, Ph.D., Asst. Prof. of Linguistics, English Department
>
> Soochow University, Waishuanghsi Campus, Taipei 11102, Taiwan, ROC
>
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