From: Torsten
Message: 66962
Date: 2010-12-14
>How do the tackle the problem of defining a metric for semantics?
> At 5:10:00 PM on Monday, December 13, 2010,
> johnvertical@... wrote:
>
> >>> As for how to do it, if you're at a loss of methodology:
> >>> you could demonstrate regular derivational relationships
> >>> among these words. Or failing this, you could calculate
> >>> how many different words with semantics as similar as
> >>> this, and a shared structure as similar as
> >>> *l-and-medial-nasal-or-labial, we statistically expect
> >>> to find in the languages you are taking into account,
> >>> and to sho that that number is much smaller than the
> >>> number of forms you listed considered to be separate.
>
> >> Nobody does that, so I won't.
>
> > All historical linguistics is based on regularly deriving
> > words from one another. Inference from statistical
> > properties of lexicons is indeed rarer (I've seen some
> > examples, none of the precise scope I suggested there),
> > but that doesn't render it an invalid method.
>
> See, for example, Ann Kumar & Phil Rose, 'Lexical Evidence
> for Early Contact between Indonesian Languages and
> Japanese', Oceanic Linguistics, Vol. 39, no. 2 (December
> 2000).