SV: Indo-Hittite

[Larry Trask]

Stanley Friesen writes:

>  So far the "cladistic linguistics" I have seen has fallen far short of what
>  biologists do - many of the solutions to statistical issues that biologists
>  have come up with are not applied.

But our problems are not identical to those of the biologists, and their
solutions do not necessarily work for us.

For one thing, the biologists have a lot more material to work with than
we do.  They have genes, but we don't.  They have fossils, but we mostly
don't.

It is, in my view, an error to assume that comparative linguistics is
isomorphic to biological taxonomy, and that what is true or successful
in one field must be true or successful in the other.

As for statistical (probabilistic) approaches, some linguists have been
trying very hard to develop these, but the difficulties are considerable,
indeed almost refractory, and so far no one has been able to come up with
a probabilistic approach which can be regarded as generally satisfactory.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk