Indo-Hittite Hypothesis

[Hans Holm]

>I do not believe - again, from the papers we have - that the algorithm
>used on IE at UPenn ever produced an 'unrooted tree'.  Contrary to what
>has been said on this list in the past, the external adjustments
>appeared to have been made directly to the algorithm from the outset.
>What we see in the papers is a model of a 'unrooted tree', but I could
>not find one that represents the IE languages.

.. see Warnow/Ringe/Taylor in 'Proceedgs 7th Ann.ACM-SIAM Symp on Discrete
Algorithms',
  p.318: "In Linguists, ..., we are interested in /minimal/ trees."
Minimal trees are not inferring additional (ancestral) nodes (cf. Kruskal
1956). And exactly out of this reason Warnow explained:

  p.319 "(note that it is a rooted tree, because our encoding of our
linguistic judgements includes the directionylity constraints)."

On the same page, you will further find that decisions were partly made on
single (!) lexemes, and if not fitting, these were simply declared as
undetected borrowing (!).

Regards
Hans J. Holm
D-30629 Hannover, (no mails >16kB please).