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<p>Many thanks, Guillaume, for your post and the link to your paper
(Pellard et al.), which looks very useful.</p>
<p>As you say, the reliability of these studies hinges on the
cognate coding, which is done manually, by humans with their
biases. I'm wondering if there is a way to measure the degree to
which different linguists agree or not (by some kind of kappa
statistic), and a way to identify or exclude systematic biases
(which are part of normal human behaviour). Another thing that I
worry about is that grammatical markers (even demonstratives and
interrogatives) are ignored (see the list of 170 comparison
meanings in IE-COR: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://iecor.clld.org/parameters">https://iecor.clld.org/parameters</a>), even
though we know that these are the most resistant to borrowing.
Especially in closely related languages, it's very hard to
distinguish lexical loanwords from inherited words, isn't it? (For
example, Dutch begrijpen 'understand' is said to have been
borrowed from German <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://wold.clld.org/word/72181920155924122">https://wold.clld.org/word/72181920155924122</a>,
but without the rich attestation of both languages since the
Middle Ages, we wouldn't be able to tell.)</p>
<p>So it is my feeling that looking at unrelated languages is much
safer in typology. And I don't understand why Simon Greenhill said
(about the proposal to sample only one language from a family):<br>
</p>
<p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap"><font size="2">"But then what does this mean when you take one language from a family like Austronesian with ~1300 languages and a one from a family like Eastern Trans-Fly with 4 languages. This means that you've sampled 0.0007% of Austronesian but 1/4 of ETF. This feels wrong."</font></span></p>
<p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap">It doesn't feel wrong to me at all, just as it doesn't feel wrong to treat large languages like Russian in the same way as small languages like Sorbian. They have many more speakers, but these speakers are not independent of each other; in the same way, Austronesian speakers are not independent of each other, so a genealogically stratified sample would have only one Austronesian language (one that is at least 30 languages away from Papuan languages).</span></p>
<p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap">Best,</span></p>
<p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap">Martin
</span></p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 07.11.23 09:33, Guillaume Jacques
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAAzt3zaW3KULvamMfePqSywjGZ8kXkcoMEXSqYYuiizz7e6xQA@mail.gmail.com">
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<div dir="ltr">The consensus trees that are published in the
articles on phylogeny is just the tip of the iceberg of
the amount of information you can gain from these tree
distributions, but for now there is no convenient
interface to explore these data, and some knowledge of R
or other languages is necessary. This forthcoming chapter
presents a (hopefully) readable introduction to
phylogenies for historical linguists: <a
href="https://www.academia.edu/101656989/The_Family_Tree_model"
moz-do-not-send="true">(99+) The Family Tree model |
Guillaume Jacques and Thomas Pellard - Academia.edu</a></div>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div><br>
</div>
<div>In the end, what decides the reliability of these
studies is the reliability of cognate coding, which
means that historical linguistics specialized in
meticulous etymologies and sound laws will play a
crucial part, and should work collectively to produce
better phylogenies, which typologists can then use to
study the distribution of structural features through
time and space.</div>
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</blockquote>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/">https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/</a></pre>
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