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

[Isidore Dyen]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Sat, 27 Jun 1998, Jacob Baltuch wrote:
 
You might wish tpo distinguish between 'linguistic distance' a measure
which would be typological and thus a measure of the difference in a
contrastive comparison and 'genetic distance' a measure of the distance
between two related languages perhaps as it might be found in a
family-tree. The latter has been transmuted into a spatial representation
by J.Kruskal via multidimensional scaling based on lexicostatistical
percentages. I am not sure whether any one has tried to measure
contrastive distance though that may be directly attackable. ID
> ----------------------------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).
>