Ancestor-descendant distance

[Jon Patrick]

 Lloyd Anderson says"

    We must evaluate the tool against cases where we think we know what
    answers it should give, and try to see what parameters do limit or might
    limit its extrapolation to cases where we have no independent basis for
    drawing a conclusion.

This is the explicit reason we started with the Chinese dialect -we had the
mother and two daughter languages, we had the linguists representation of the
relative chronolgy. The question was - could we repoduce the results of the
linguists and from that add more information about the structure of the
relative Chronolgy. The answer was "yes".

    A study of the work of Ringe and company on the family tree of
    Indo-European, in comparison with the method proposed by
    Jon Patrick, could be interesting.  I would think, from the brief
    description Patrick supplied, and from what I have read of Ringe's
    work, that Patrick would want a larger quantity of computerized data
    than was put into the data set used by Ringe?

I suspect so, but maybe not. A small data set merely limits the strength of
the conclusions you arrive at. The computation itself is not limited by the
dataset size. Indeed the computation could well inform you that the dataset is
not large enough to given any statistically reliable result. That alone would
be useful. We would be happy to process the data if made available to us.

    We now have an international standard computer Code, Unicode,
    which contains most of the characters needed for transliteration
    (Latin-standard-based letters) and for phonetic transcription (IPA).
    It would be useful to try to establish a standard for Comparative
    Data sets, into which all existing computer data sets can be translated,
    so that the massive sets of data can be made available for studies
    such as this.
here, here
Jon
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