The Significance of Word Lists (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- The significance of word lists by Brett Kessler
This is a significant revision of a Ph.D. dissertation submitted in the Stanford Department of Linguistics in 1999 (available from UMI dissertation services under the title Estimating the probability of historical connections between languages). It should, however, be emphasized that the book under review is a rather different animal from a typical doctoral dissertation.
In Ch. 1 (1–16) Kessler presents the main purpose of the book and provides a general introduction to the basic methodology and problems connected to statistical evaluations of language connectivity. Ch. 2 (17–41) leads the reader through what can best be described as a crash-course in statistics and, in the final ten pages, how statistics have and may be applied to historical linguistics. The following seven chapters (43–144) are concerned with various aspects and problems connected to statistical measurements of language correspondence. K offers a number of important insights and suggestions on how existing methods may be improved or modified to reduce the risks of misleading or incorrect results. To illustrate his theoretical arguments, K uses a data set of 200 words in English, French, German, Latin, Albanian, Turkish, Hawaiian, and Navajo (38f.). Ch. 10, the longest in the book (145–80), explores the χ2 metric and some problems connected to it as a statistical method. K concludes that there are strong arguments in favor of recurrence (R2) metric as an alternative to the χ2 metric. Different phonetic issues as well as tests involving multiple phonemes are addressed, and, while not entirely dismissive, K argues against multilateral comparisons to show language relatedness. Ch. 11 (181–97) summarizes the book and offers what is, regardless of whether one chooses to employ K’s methodology or not, useful advice to anyone attempting to embark on a statistical study of languages. A lengthy appendix (199–257) lists the 200 different words used in the book’s many methodological examples. Shorter etymological notes (with [End Page 442] references) are provided. The book ends with a list of references (259–66) and a general index (267–77).
According to K, the book is targeted for ‘linguists who are curious about statistical argumentation but do not necessarily wish to devote an inordinate amount of attention to its more tortuous byways’ (180), and the book can indeed be successfully studied by a more general readership.
As stated by the author (19ff.), the establishment of true relatedness between languages represents only a minor part of historical linguistics, the main concern being to evaluate and investigate the already established types of relations. The author, however, rather than trying to establish the nature of the historical connection of a set of languages—or presenting any method on how it could be established—attempts to fill a gap in the field of historical linguistics by offering a statistical method to establish historical correspondence between languages. Obviously, a major issue is to decide what can be considered true correspondence as contrasted to correspondence generated by chance. Whether K’s measure of relatedness is going to be more universally accepted and employed by historical linguists remains to be seen. However, the numerous tests performed on the 200-word lists are convincing, and since K invites other experts to apply the methodology to other languages, the reviewer sees no reason why it should not.
On the whole, K’s book is a most thorough study of statistical methodology that can be most enthusiastically recommended to both students and more established scholars interested in all forms of lexicostatistical analyzing.
