Re: Ringe's Work at U Penn

I am very unsure of the details of Ringe's work, but essentially, they are constructing 'rootless trees' using a supercomputer. The data consists of lexical, phonological and grammatical material taken from well-attested languages. The object is to discern pylogenic relationships, and measure the degree of relatedness between the individual data sets.

This is not glottochronology, in that chronological information plays only a small role. I might be wrong, but it seems they are having a computer do the huge 'eyeball comparison' that Greenberg used to demonstrate the Afro-Asiatic family of languages. This, then, would be the comparative method carried to its logical conclusion.

One interesting finding, illustrated on their web pages, is how difficult it is to place Germanic; so far, all they can say is that it is just outside the satemic core.

Apparently, the monograph for the initial work is more or less 'in publication'.

Mark Odegard.