background noise

[ECOLING at aol.com]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

In a message dated 3/24/99 7:58:55 PM, John McLaughlin wrote:

>I did some random language generation and comparison on computer based on
>known phonological inventories and frequencies.  The results were published
>in the most recent Mid-America Linguistics Conference Proceedings and are
>also available on Pat Ryan's web site (where he graciously notes that I don't
>agree with hardly any of his findings)--although without the tables yet.
>Computer-controlled comparison revealed that the closer two phonologies were
>to one another the higher the frequency of random lookalikes and the smaller
>the phonological inventories the higher the frequency of random lookalikes.

Good.
Now if we were doing radiocarbon dating, what would we do?
Introduce a "corrected" radiocarbon date.

In this case, "corrected" by some factor based on simplicity of phoneme
inventory,
and based on similarity of two phonologies.  (The last of these seems to imply
that human judgements are influenced by superficial similarities, or that some
mechanical formula was done in such a way that it is influenced by such
superficial similarities.  It is not clear from the quotation above whether the
"comparison" part was by human or machine.)

So here, what we can do is introduce a "corrected" measure of
similarity, with an appendix to any work which uses such methods,
indicating exactly what the corrections are,
because these corrections will be continually modified over time,
and will vary from user to user, based on their judgement of what
corrections should be used.
Gradually, as a field of historical lingusitics, our measures should
converge on some asymptotes (though with additional discontinuities
never excluded, as we learn more of what influences judgements
of random lookalikes).

It would be important that the data of any such studies of randomness,
and the exact computations used, should be in public view at all times
and electronically available, so anyone with a more refined formula
for counting things as "alike", or better, degree-of-similarity, can
see the result of such definitional changes on the computations.
That way we can refine our ideas of what we can look for in
seeking similarities which are less likely to be due to chance.

And as I have urged a number of times, this should ALSO be tested
against cases where languages are known to be related, to see whether
degree of relationship can be estimated (of course given different
degrees of intensity of change, it cannot be exactly a measure of time,
but on average it could be.  We can have a two-dimensional graph
of similarity-computations on one axis versus ranked but not precisely
quantified (ordinal not necessarily interval) categories of intensity of
exposure to outside forces on the other axis.

I am not naive enough to think that a mechanistic approach can substitute
for good historical linguistics and philology.  I am simply advocating that
when we use any tool, including statistical estimates, that we

A propos of Don Ringe's work recently,
it strikes me that by using all of the knowledge of sound changes and
etc. done previously, it can readily be said to build in its results
through the choice of the data used.  This may be unfair, and I have
not read extensively in Ringe's work.  But his claims in at least one
presentation that his results came out very similar to what historical
linguistics has done, coupled with comments that the previous historical
linguistics work was not done carefully or scientificially, strike me
as very very odd in several respects.  It tempts reactions like
"of course it came out very much like what historical linguists had done,
if it did not we would be inclined to doubt it", and "if a supposedly more
scientific method comes out with nearly the same results as produced
by historical linguists, then their work cannot be all that bad".

My point here is the difficulty of finding any absolute mechanistic
approach.  Ringe could not have done his work without the prior
extensive work of the historical linguists.

Lloyd Anderson