GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?)

[Stefan Georg]

>   An easy accessible attempt on this topic is Mark Rosenfelder 'How likely
>   are chance resemblances between languages? in www.zompist.com/chance.html.
>   Though in the binomial formulas one faculty mark '!' is always set wrong*,
>   the results are correct. (*what shows that in one year nobody with minimal
>   mathematical competence really did read this article).

>   HJH

There is a sizable body of literature on this topic, some with foul, some
with fair mathematics, no doubt about this.

What most of the books and article I've seen *don't* address, however, is
the question how "resemblances" are to be defined in the first place. Your
resemblance may not at all be mine, and the literature on macro-comparative
efforts illustrates this amply.

It is, however, the crucial question. What is more, mathematical approaches
like these tend to treat language (always and only lexicon, to be sure, as
if lexicon had *anything* to do with lg. classification, which it of course
hasn't) as a static entity, ignoring what may be known about the history of
individual items.  They also ignore the range of psychological factors
which increase iconicity in language, something which will always
contribute to more "resemblances" being found than the calculation of
probabilities seemed to allow, invariably followed by a loud "he:ureka" and
startled incomprehension on discovering the linguistic community yawning.

This is not against Rosenfelder, whose attempt I've not found easily
accessible, mainly because the link above is dead.

St.G.

Dr. Stefan Georg
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