background noise

[Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 3/11/99 9:56:17 PM, Larry Trask wrote:

>>For one thing, languages with similar phoneme systems, similar
>>phonotactic patterns and similar morpheme-structure constraints are
>>likely to show a higher proportion of chance resemblances than arbitrary
>>languages.

>If that is true, then we need to introduce a correction factor into our tools,
>in other words, we have recognized a distortion imposed by our tools,
>and we can attempt to counteract that distortion.

I did some random language generation and comparison on computer based on known
phonological inventories and frequencies.  The results were published in the
most recent Mid-America Linguistics Conference Proceedings and are also
available on Pat Ryan's web site (where he graciously notes that I don't agree
with hardly any of his findings)--although without the tables yet.
Computer-controlled comparison revealed that the closer two phonologies were to
one another the higher the frequency of random lookalikes and the smaller the
phonological inventories the higher the frequency of random lookalikes.

John McLaughlin
Utah State University