Re[2]: [tied] Mother of all IE languages

At 6:41:25 PM on Tuesday, December 2, 2003, S.Kalyanaraman
wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
> <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

>> The word lists were designed to be lists of meanings that
>> all languages have. A few meanings actually change their
>> words very frequently - 'road' comes to mind as one of
>> them. Words of the sort that you are discussing above
>> are excluded from the lists by design. That is not to
>> say that some words are not vulnerable to replacement as
>> a group - native number systems have been swept aside in
>> much of East Asia, and we've recently had much discussion
>> about the plausible Semitic origin of PIE *septm 'seven'.

> When words are excluded from a list by design, the
> selection does not become random and to such a sample, the
> statistical techniques cannot be applied.

This is nonsense. Swadesh-like lists are not intended to be
random samples and are not used as if they were.

Brian