Basque statistics - methodological contradiction

Jon Patrick jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au
Fri Sep 3 07:52:49 UTC 1999


    Date:       Fri, 13 Aug 1999 16:14:38 +0100 (BST)
    From:       Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>

I was struck by  this comment at the very end of LArry's mail of friday 13th
August

    Advance assumptions about what we `ought' to find are dangerous.

The full text of Larry's comment is below as a response to Lloyd Anderson's
proposal( a course I am following) that words should not be discarded from
analysis of early basque by Larry's criteria.

[ start LT quote]
Well, I am unwilling to assume in advance that CV syllable structures
must have been typical of Pre-Basque.  In fact, my preliminary work
suggests strongly that Pre-Basque had an enormous proportion of
vowel-initial words, probably totaling at least 50% of the recoverable
lexicon, and possibly more.  This I consider unusual, though a query
last year on the LINGUIST List turned up a few other languages with the
same property.

Romance languages generally have a much lower proportion of
vowel-initial words -- for example, a quick trawl of my biggest Spanish
dictionary suggests that about 25% of Spanish words are vowel-initial.
So, if we assume that we should automatically be preferring C-initials,
we are likely to start preferring Romance words to native Basque words.
Advance assumptions about what we `ought' to find are dangerous.
[end LT quote]

This is presented after a long and detailed response to Lloyd Anderson's
revision of his 6 rules for deciding what should be used as acceptable words
in the study of early basque words. Larry's rules are highly restrictive and
my counter argument is that they are too restrictive and they do not let the
data speak for themselves.

It seems to me, unless I am misreading something, that Larry's final comment
objects to someone else entertaining an a priori model of the data as making
assumptions, but doesn't perceive that he is making assumptions from his own
expectations  of what a basque word should look like.
cheers
Jon
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