Contributions by Steve Long

[Richard M. Alderson III]

On 30 Sep 1999, Sean Crist wrote:

> Of course, people had noticed that there were certain things shared by Italic
> and Celtic; it had certainly been previously proposed that Anatolian was an
> 'aunt' to the other IE languages, etc.; but there was previously no way of
> pursuing the question in a systematic and unified way.

[ snip ]

> You obviously missed my post where I corrected myself on this point.  There
> were actually two characters added which were crucial to forcing Celtic and
> Italic into a single sub-branch.  Even before those two additional characters
> were added, Italic and Celtic were always next to each other on the tree; and
> on two of the best runs, an indeterminate structure was produced for which
> one resolution was an Italo-Celtic grouping.  So the tree was already on the
> verge of an Italo-Celtic grouping before these additional characters were
> added.

I've now read the technical report in which the early results were published.
As it appears from Mr. Crist's comments on the UPenn tree, further work has
continued to refine the original results.

Is the list of characters published anywhere electronically accessible?  I'd be
curious to see what the definitions for the Hittite vs. the world codings were
--it may very well be that a different view of laryngeals, for example, would
change the outcome greatly.

I have a larger problem with the tree as a whole, now that I know more of the
details:  Only one language from each sub-family was used to provide input, and
I believe that *this* choice may very well have biased some results.  I would
be much happier if the Italic and Celtic languages were not from the respective
"Q" branches thereof.  Does any of the papers provide information on how long a
run of the program to interpret the characters actually runs (rather than the
theoretical O(<mumble>) specification)?  How much time would be added by data
from other languages?

								Rich Alderson