The topic has been talked to death elsewhere. What has to be
understood (so far as I understand it) is that Don Ringe et al's work is
producing ROOTLESS trees. When they proclaim Old English's location on this
tree, they are being somewhat tongue-in-cheek: they are reporting what their
computer runs turn out.
Essentially, all they are saying is that OE (which is NOT a
satem language) is nonetheless best placed inside the group which did undergo
satemization. The literature I've read says there are incompletely explained
peculiarities in Germanic which largely disappear if you posit a
strong genetic (but pre-satemic) relationship with the B-S and I-I
branches.
Much of what they are doing seems to be
'tinkering'. They are attempting to find those
linguistic features which can accurately predict known relationships, and then
apply the same methodology to unknown relationships. One can only wish them
success.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2000 4:11
AM
Subject: [cybalist] Computational
Historical Linguistics
this is a comment, concerning the work of the Computational Historical
Linguistics Project at University of Pennsylvania (
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~histling/home.html. Perhaps I am
just a grouchy physicist, but I don't see any value in what they have
done