Re: [Corpora-List] Density of Language Taxa

From: John F. Sowa (sowa@bestweb.net)
Date: Tue May 09 2006 - 18:36:12 MET DST

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    Those are interesting results, but for those of us
    who have never done any studies with such techniques,
    could you please point to some other web sites that
    have further background information.

    > Dear Corpora colleagues, please comment on the following...

    One question I would like to ask is how bilingualism
    with neighboring languages might affect the distribution
    of consonantal groups.

    Since Hungarian is an island in the middle of Indo-European,
    there are many native Hungarian speakers who are bilingual
    in one or more of the neighboring languages, as attested
    by the very large number of loan words from Slavonic and
    Germanic languages. Could that account for some of the
    dispersion in the following results:

    > It is possible to explain the great value of dispersion
    > of the Ugric group by the fact that the structure of the
    > Hungarian speech sound chain is too different from those
    > of Mansi and Hanty.

    How do you distinguish the effects of cognates vs.
    loan words vs. sound changes influenced by bilingualism?

    Is it possible to evaluate the dispersion in cognates
    only? Or to evaluate how much the cognates might have
    changed in the direction of the loan words? Or how
    much the loan words have been modified in the direction
    of the cognates?

    John Sowa



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