--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mkelkar2003" <swatimkelkar@...> wrote:
>
> Interdisciplinary Indiscipline? Can Phylogenetic Methods
> Meaningfully Be Applied to Language Data
> and to Dating Language?
>
>
http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/~pah1003/loe/All/PapersDownLoad/2006%20%20Heggarty%20-%20Interdisciplinary%20Indiscipline.pdf
>
"The resulting phenogram immediately strikes
linguists as `wrong' at first glance. It is at odds with
the phylogeny commonly proposed for Romance,
which has an Iberian sub-branch in which Portuguese
and Spanish are more closely related to each other
than either is to French. Given the historical reality of
the origins of Romance as a dialect continuum, that
phylogeny is not necessarily accepted here without
many provisos; but by the same token the aim here
is certainly not to argue for the tree in Figure 16.1
either. Rather, it serves to illustrate just how easily a
certain selection of language data can give a similarity
or correspondences phenogram out of line with the true
phylogeny. (There are more examples within the Spa
Don't apply trees to everything!
M. Kelkar