Re: Swadesh Lists

--- In Nostratica@yahoogroups.com, "H.M. Hubey" <hubeyh@...> wrote:

> The *PIE sounds and the changes in the daughter languages have
> not been agreed upon.

I think you'll find the basic correspondences are pretty well agreed
upon. The arguments are about origins (i.e. in pre-IE), details and
phonetics.

> There should be quantitative metics e.g. like R^2 for
> statistical fitting. Among the factors
>
> 1. how many rules

How are you going to score the number of rules? Latin to French is
reckoned to need 200 rules, so I suspect you'll be encountering cases
of too few rules rather than cases of too many.

Possibly the rules should also be scored for complexity
and 'naturalness', though I think that will open many a can of worms.

> 2. how many words are explicable with these rules
> 3. how many starred forms are needed

I don't understand this factor. Please expand on what you have in
mind.

> 4. how good are the semantics
> etc
>
> Richard Wordingham wrote:

> > Another example is the pair
> > *pah2ur- and *h2ngni- of PIE words
> > for 'fire'.

Correction: *h1ngni-, not +h2ngni-.

I'm not sure that any of your hinted at principles will help with the
examples I gave.

Richard.