background noise

[ECOLING at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/11/99 9:56:17 PM, Larry Trask wrote:

>I don't think it's realistic to try to estimate the degree of background
>noise for languages generally: there are just too many complicating
>factors.

Agreed, that was a part of my point.

>For one thing, languages with similar phoneme systems, similar
>phonotactic patterns and similar morpheme-structure constraints are
>likely to show a higher proportion of chance resemblances than arbitrary
>languages.

If that is true, then we need to introduce a correction factor into our tools,
in other words, we have recognized a distortion imposed by our tools,
and we can attempt to counteract that distortion.

>For another, no general approach to background noise can
>hope to distinguish between common inheritance and borrowing; this is
>something that has to be done by painstaking and hard-nosed linguistic
>investigation, and sometimes it can hardly be done at all.

Once borrowed, words become part of common inheritance relative to
later descendents.

Lloyd Anderson