The Significance of Word Lists

The most strident controversies in historical linguistics debate whether claims for historical connections between languages are erroneously based on chance similarities between word lists. But even though it is the province of statistical mathematics to judge whether evidence is significant or due to chance, neither side in these debates uses statistics, leaving readers little room to adjudicate competing claims objectively. This book fills that gap by presenting a new statistical methodology that helps linguists decide whether short word lists have more recurrent sound correspondences than can be expected by chance. The author shows that many of the complicating rules of thumb linguists invoke to obviate chance resemblances, such as multilateral comparison or emphasizing grammar over vocabulary, actually decrease the power of quantitative tests. But while the statistical methodology itself is straightforward, the author also details the extensive linguistic work needed to produce word lists that do not yield nonsensical results.

Brett Kessler is in the Psychology Department at Wayne State University.

Contents

1/1/2001