Excluding data

[Jon Patrick]

On Sat, 25 Sep 1999 14:47:24 -050
 "Roslyn M. Frank" <roz-frank at uiowa.edu> said

    At 03:16 PM 9/24/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:
    [snip]
    [LT]
    >As I've pointed out before, the first goal is to identify those words
    >with the strongest claims to being native and ancient -- not to make
    >sure we include every word which might conceivably be native and
    >ancient, since any attempt at this must inevitably sweep up an awful lot
    >of words which are not ancient.  First things first.

    Who is "we"? I thought that Jon was doing one version of this project(using
    a computer as an aid) and you were doing another (using paper)?! Or at
    least I think that something to that effect was stated in an earlier
    mailing.

Yes, this is what I believe I'm doing, with a couple of variations from Larry.
I view the WHOLE Azkue list as the starting point. It then gets culled
according to a variety of criteria -most of which Larry and I agree on, but
with crucial differences. I am also keen to make a stochastic analysis of the
phonological patterns of the words (current decriptions are over generalised
where of the wordforms they describe only 10% of that space is populated by
"real" words). Secondly I will work methodically starting from the
monosyllables upwards into bisyllables, trisyllables etc.

For the sake of the list members who would be highly familiar with Larry's
work but perhaps less familiar with most Basque scholars. I have presented my
initial results to Basque histroical linguists in the Basque Coumntry and they
have found my results informative and have encouraged me to extend and publish
them.

Jon
______________________________________________________________
The meaning of your communication is the response you get