Q: linguistic distance (was Re: Complexity in language)

[Jacob Baltuch]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Some problems in defining a global complexity measure of a language
have been mentioned. One of the problems seems to be the "incommen-
surability" (to use Isidore Dyen's term) of measures of complexity
for various sub-systems. I'm wondering if there is any thoughts out
there on the problems involved in defining "linguistic distance"?
(In the sense of a metric that would measure how different languages
are from one another).