Nahuatl Dominant Word Order

[Davius Sanctex]

Dear Jeff MacSwan:

I have read carefully your paper on polysunthesis
parameter. I thing it is a good work, but I dislike
general tone it is too controversial and it seems a
a personal attack. One way or another, it is a valuable
paper; although it is too collateral to the question of
diachronic change in dominant word order.

I don't know the work of Baker, and I will silent about
the matter. One of my criticism to the paper are:

1) The examples ob langages having properties 2c-2n without
being polysinthetic are irrelevant as yourself say and don't
disclaim Baker's work. If we discuss the validity of statement
"A implies B" it is sophistic mention examples with "B but not
A" (these examples are irrelevant).

2)I have carried out a chi-2 stadistical test of the samples you
give in page 105 and the result is that there are by no means
homogeneous (X2 = 53,91 muy lejos del valor límite que es 21,1
dispongo de los cálculos detallados!). Probabily the samples are
excesively reduced to be statiscally significant. In fact, with a confidence
of 0,95 the samples don't represent the same population
and therefore they correspond to diferent styles. Comparaision by
pairs are:


         Text 1   Text 2  Text 3  Text 4  Text 5
Text 1   __       12,79   26,56   12,97    5,58
Text 2   __       __       8,21    4,89    3,58
Text 3   __       __       __     21,40    7,22
Text 4   __       __       __      __      6,35

greater this value more the difference between the two samples)
Values superior to 7,82 (with confidence 95%) indicate that
the two samples are statiscally not homogeneous, for a condidence
greater thant 97,5% values must be superior to . Homogeneity:

         Text 1   Text 2  Text 3  Text 4  Text 5
Text 1   __       no      no      no      yes
Text 2   __       __      no      yes     yes
Text 3   __       __       __     no      yes
Text 4   __       __       __      __     yes


Text 1 is (see values of X2) strongly different from others.
Text 2 and text 4 are similar, and finally text 5 is similar
to all others.

Claims that Southeast Puebla Nahuatl is otherwise valuable,
as exemple (5) in page 104 shows, but I don't see valuable
the evidence from text because they are too different and
reduced.

Ma tlacualcan

____________________________________________
David Sánchez Molina, Ph. D
Profesor Asociado
Structures Design in Industrial Engineering
Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya
Barcelona, Spain
david.sanchez-molina at upc.es
davius_sanctex at upc.es
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