lexico-statistics

[Scott DeLancey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Wed, 16 Dec 1998, Larry Trask wrote:

> As for the universal validity of Swadesh's lists, this has been very
> severely questioned on a number of grounds.  People continue to use
> Swadesh's lists, since no other list appears to have a better claim to
> universality, but specialists in particular families or areas have
> sometimes drawn up their own lists.  For example, somebody (I forget
> who) has drawn up a list of words appropriate for working with in
> southeast Asia.

That's Jim Matisoff's CALMSEA (Culturally Appropriate Lexicostatistical
Model for SouthEast Asia), presented in his Variational Semantics in
Tibeto-Burman (ISHI, 1978).

I don't know what kind of research may have gone into Swadesh's lists,
but, as Matisoff points out, the 200-list contains, for example, both
'ice' and 'snow', which are hardly universal core vocabulary, as well
as 'at' and 'in', which concepts are undoubtedly expressed in every
language, but not universally by distinct words dedicated explicitly to
those meanings, and words like 'cut', which have no single equivalent
in many languages.

Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA

delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html