Random Noise - quite different questions?

[Dr. John E. McLaughlin]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Indo-European mailing list [mailto:Indo-European at xkl.com]On Behalf
> Of ECOLING at aol.com
> Sent: Wednesday, September 01, 1999 9:37 PM
> To: Indo-European at xkl.com
> Subject: Random Noise - quite different questions?

> Do it for Indo-European, for goodness sake,
> where we AGREE that the languages all belong
> to one family, and yet MUCH vocabulary
> is NOT represented throughout the family.
> That does not cause us to doubt the reality of IE.
> When pushed by the data pattern, linguists discuss
> dialect chains or even networks or areal subparts of IE.
> So how much of this should we expect for different
> depths of relationship?
> Get the statistics on this, formulated in a simple
> and objective way which can be compared with
> both other known and unknown cases.
> across different levels of depth of dialects,
> families, family groupings and super-families of IE,
> see whether the rate of representation tails off in
> a linear, geometric, or other pattern with increasing
> depth, and what the range of variation is for different
> instances of the "same" time depth (which might
> depend on different social situations, such as
> the relative isolation of Icelandic, vs. Scandinavian,
> vs. mainland Germanic from other closely related
> languages of their family).

Donald Ringe has already done something like this comparing Indo-European
with Nostratic ('Nostratic' and the Factor of Chance, Diachronica 12:1.55-74
(1995)).  He found that when looking at the number of subgroups represented
in cognate sets versus what would be predicted from chance resemblances,
Indo-European showed a much-greater-than-chance number of sets with cognates
in multiple subgroups and Nostratic showed the number of sets expected from
chance.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
3200 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, UT  84322-3200

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