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<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE>----------------------------Original
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<BR>Larry Trask wrote:
<P>> So, my question: does anybody believe that any version of this
<BR>> statement is valid? More precisely, do we have a number N and
<BR>> a set of criteria C such that the existence between two languages
<BR>> of N matches satisfying criteria C is enough to guarantee that
<BR>> the languages must be related?</BLOCKQUOTE>
Wasn't this what Donald Ringe was trying to do? (The Factor of Chance
in Language Comparison, Philadelphia 1992).
<P>But the statement phrased as you have it is certainly not valid.
First no number of "matches" (sound correspondences?) can *guarantee* that
the languages are related, only that the probability of their being related
is high. Second "related" has to be understood as historically related
rather than genetically related, because numerical criteria only help to
decide the issue chance vs. non-chance similarity, not which type of historical
contingency (descent from a common source or subsequent contact) may have
produced the non-chance pattern. Third there is no absolute number valid
in all cases, because it depends on the size and nature of the sample being
compared. Specifically in the case of sound correspondences, the bigger
the dictionary or word list the more chance correspondences can be expected;
and the smaller the segment inventories of the languages compared the more
chance correspondences can be expected. This is because the average expected
number of chance occurences of an event (in this case a correspondence
at a given position in a word) is the probablility of the event (in this
case the relative frequency in the given position of the segments compared
multiplied by each other) times the number of trials (in this case the
number of semantically equivalent words available for comparison).
<P>So if you have two languages A and B, both of which have only ten consonants
evenly distributed in word first position, and you have an A-B dictionary
which has 10,000 entries correlating one word in A with one and only one
semantic equivalent in B, with no synonyms in either langauge, you'd expect
to find about 100 matches between any first consonant in A and any first
consonant in B (chance that x will occur as first consonant in A: 1/10,
multiplied by chance that y will occur as first consonant in B: 1/10, multiplied
by total places where 1st C of a word in A can be compared with 1st
C of word in B: 10,000). So you wouldn't be justified in suspecting a historical
relationship till you got a good bit over a 100 matches. On the other
hand if you had two languages with 25 consonants evenly distributed and
a lexicon based on a1000 word random sample, you'd expect an average of
only 1.6 first consonant matches (1/25 * 1/25 * 1000). So you'd be justified
to suspect a non-accidental, hence historical relationship even with as
few as 4 or 5 matches.
<BR>
<P>
<BR> Bobby D. Bryant wrote:
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE>
<P>In short, I don't think such a formalization of the problem in terms
of N and
<BR>C is going to work in practice. At some level you are always
going to have
<BR>to pile on enough examples to convince your peers, which is of course
the way
<BR>things have always worked.
<BR> </BLOCKQUOTE>
Piling on enough examples to convince your peers no longer works in practice,
or else the long-distance comparison debates would not have become as
acrimonious
as they have. Formalizing the problem seems to me to be the only way forward.
Besides, isn't that where the joy of research lies-- in ever sharpening
and refining our understanding of our subject matter and of the tools we
use to analyze it?
<BR>
<P>
<P>-- <FONT FACE="Times New
Roman,Times">-----------------------------------------------------------</FONT>
<BR><FONT FACE="Times New Roman,Times">Robert R. Ratcliffe</FONT>
<BR><FONT FACE="Times New Roman,Times">Dept. of Linguistics and Information
Science</FONT>
<BR><FONT FACE="Times New Roman,Times">Tokyo University of Foreign
Studies</FONT>
<BR><FONT FACE="Times New Roman,Times">Asahi-machi 3-11-1,</FONT>
<BR><FONT FACE="Times New Roman,Times">Fuchu-shi, Tokyo</FONT>
<BR><FONT FACE="Times New Roman,Times">183-8534 Japan</FONT>
<BR>
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