Gerry:
>Never said that linguistics and equations mixed. What I do know is >that
>Neil Postman developed a set of text books on a mathematical >approach to
>linguistics which was incorporated into the California >educational system.
> Now math and linguistics as far as Noun =1; >Verb =2; Adjective =3;
>Adverb =4 seems to work.
Hmm, why is it that I also see a disproportionate amount of Proto-World and
IE-is-a-conspiracy sites originating out of California...
Gerry, what are you trying to state here? What informed mathematics can we
perform on "Noun=1, Verb=2, Adjective=3..."?? I rest my case.
By the way, the division of words into classes like noun and verb is
arbitrary. There are languages where there is no formal distinction between
noun and verb (aka Cantonese, Proto-Uralic, etc). What's more, in colloquial
(and quite possibly post-modern) English, many adverbs and adjectives are
the same form (Eg: "I went to bed quick").
In the end, I repeat, this time in a different way: Only general linguistic
trends might be found by statistics but to use it to reconstruct a language
is logically unfounded.
- gLeN
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