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

At 1:18:08 on Wednesday, 3 December 2003, S.Kalyanaraman wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> <BMScott@...> wrote:

>>> 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.

> There is nothing nonsensical about statistical techniques.

I quite agree. I'm a mathematician, after all, and I
occasionally teach basic statistics. I was commenting on
your misunderstanding, not on the statistics.

> Two definitions are critical: population and sample. If a
> sample is used to derive the characteristics of a
> population, the sample has to be random.

Do you know the expression 'teaching your grandmother to
suck eggs'?

Whatever its shortcomings, the Gray/Atkinson technique is
not an example of statistical inference, so your comment is
inapplicable to it. It isn't even applicable to
glottochronology, which -- however useless -- didn't
pretend that a Swadesh list was a random sample or try to
derive characteristics of the lexicon from it.

Brian