SV: Minoan is an IE language?

Lars Martin Fosse lmfosse at online.no
Thu Mar 8 13:58:26 UTC 2001


David Sanchez [SMTP:davius_sanctex at terra.es] skrev 3. mars 2001 02:12:

>> Could some of the Linear A inscriptions be different languages?

> A mathematical simple proof can answe the question.
> If one wish to know if two text are written in teh same language
> only it is necessary count the number of symbols in each text and
> make a simple statistical chi-2 test to obtain the answer!!!
> ( All, all text in a concrete languages present a very similar phonemic
> ocurrences. The same is true for non phonemic inscriptions).

Wouldn't the question of sample size be relevant here? If inscriptions are
very short, say only four or five words, wouldn't this make the chi-2 test
invalid? As far as I remember, you would have to assume normalcy in order
to use it, otherwise there are other tests with bigger error margins to be
used. Could you define how big a continuous text sample must be before you
can use the chi-2 test?

Lars Martin Fosse

Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse
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