🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov2.122807.25099@news.nd.edu>, scharle@lukasiewicz (scharle) writes:
>In article <1992Oct31.215441.15379@s1.gov>, lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich) writes:
>> [some stuff that I've deleted--rma]
>    ...
>    Here are a few opionions from a complete amateur.

That's OK.

>    One is that this article was extremely short on substance.  For example,
>they talk about certain prefixes and give a few examples.  However, it was not
>at all clear to me whether their examples of "my child", etc.  used prefixes
>which were functional in the language cited.  I couldn't tell whether the
>sound changes that they cited were systematic across the languages (for
>example, at one point they refer to the correspondence between "r" and "l" as
>being a common change -- how does this differ from our recent discussion of
>Hebrew being the parent of English?).  It was almost embarrassing to see a
>table in which not only Proto-Indo-European as well as English and Latin were
>used, and it was not at all clear to me what that table were supposed to be
>proving.  And what really drove me up the wall was their calculation of the
>"probabilities" of the correspondence occuring by accident!  It reminded me of
>creationist literature.

OW!  *I* wasn't *that* hard on them...

>    On the question of comparing the way that Indo-European was worked out as
>opposed to two-at-a-time comparisons, I guess that I'd think that standards
>have developed over time.  Perhaps the method that they use is _suggestive_ of
>something, but by now, the work of two-at-a-time should be starting, to see if
>the suggestions are pointing at something real.  I cannot see that there was
>anything new in the article (admittedly, I am an amateur, and may have missed
>something -- but isn't that supposed to be the audience of Scientific
>American?).

As I noted in my followup to Loren's article, this notion of binary comparisons
as the "Right Way" to do comparative work is not the methodology of any
historical linguist I know, or know of.
-- 
Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take
                such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
                                                        --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@leland.stanford.edu                              _The Lost Road_