Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: philip@storcomp.demon.co.uk (Phil Hunt)
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!udel!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!peernews.demon.co.uk!storcomp.demon.co.uk!philip
Subject: Re: List of Mandan & Welsh Points of Resemblance
References: <D3ECzH.BzG@news.cis.umn.edu> <3gtb93$269@hecate.umd.edu>
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Date: Wed, 8 Feb 1995 01:05:14 +0000
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In article <3gtb93$269@hecate.umd.edu> jmu@hamlet.umd.edu "James Unger" writes:
>         Even "look-alike" lists like this have some value
> for comparative linguistics, for they demonstrate, in a
> backhanded way, what a really good list of matches ought to
> look like, viz. a lot better than this in terms of
> interlocking, exceptionless phonemic correspondences and
> semantic fits.  If two languages that have such a tiny
> probability of being related as Mandan and Welsh can yield a
> list such as this, then we must obviously demand much better
> in cases in which the probability is, by general consensus,
> considerably higher.

One way to do it scientifically would be to have a fixed list of
a few hundred common words that are likely to stay unchanged - words
as body parts, family relationships, numbers etc, and measure how
much difference there is in (1) languages we know are related, (2)
any 2 languages taken at random. (There would have to be an algorithm
for measuring how different 2 phonetic representations are form each 
other, and perhaps it could also try to find regular sound shifts).

If this was done in a consistent way for a large number of pairs of 
languages, it would be possible to say how close 2 languages are before
coincidence become evidence of a relationship.

Does anyone know if this has actually been done?

>  Conversely, it would
> be enlightening to see how Greenberg or some Nostraticist
> would explain how this list is, in some clear and definite
> way, inferior to their lists of alleged cognates.

I once read of someone involved with Nostratic or one of these other
superfamilies who reckonned that two words were related because
they sounded similar and had similar meanings (one meant "milk", the
other "neck") - apparently the semantic shift was milk->breasts->
upper torso->neck.

-- 
Phil Hunt...philip@storcomp.demon.co.uk
Majority rule for Britain!
