Re: [tied] Linguistic measurements

From: Paul Alesu
Message: 23802
Date: 2003-06-24

Richard Wordingham wrote:
>......
> Taking the greater of the two distances is a perfectly reasonable
> approach, though its probably more interesting to work with the
> asymmetric measure as far as one can. However, we still haven't come
> up with a way of quantifying the distance.
>
> Do we want to look at dialect distance or language distance.
> .....



In my opinion, there are a couple of things to be clarified before one
tries to quantify the linguistic distance.

One: state the goal, why we need to measure the linguistic distance.

Two: state the independent axiomatic properties of the linguistic
distance that are needed in order to achieve the goal.

My thought for the goal: an objective description of the differences
between idioms. In this case there must be only one method to quantify
the linguistic distance regardless of the idioms' type - language,
dialect or subdialect.

Best regards,

Paul Alesu