The distribution of short low vowels in West Saxon Old English adjectives cannot be explained ent... more The distribution of short low vowels in West Saxon Old English adjectives cannot be explained entirely by levelling of surface forms and does not reflect lengthening in open syllables. A combination of levelling and rule restructuring is needed to account for the observed pattern.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Archaeological evidence and linguistic evidence converge in support of an origin of Indo-European... more Archaeological evidence and linguistic evidence converge in support of an origin of Indo-European languages on the Pontic-Caspian steppes around 4,000 years BCE. The evidence is so strong that arguments in support of other hypotheses should be reexamined.
Straightforward application of the ‘same birthdays’ problem shows that it is surprisingly easy to... more Straightforward application of the ‘same birthdays’ problem shows that it is surprisingly easy to find a match for any CVC-root when wordlists of many languages are compared simultaneously. A simple algorithm can be used to estimate the expected incidence of multiple CVC-matches. A test of a sample from Greenberg's ‘Amerind Etymological Dictionary’ using that algorithm finds no ‘cognate sets’ whose resemblances are clearly not the result of random factors. The same test can and should be applied to all comparative etymological dictionaries.
Joseph H. Greenberg, Indo-European and its closest relatives: the Eurasiatic language family, vol. 1: Grammar. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+326
This paper reports the results of an attempt to recover the ®rstorder subgrouping of the Indo-Eur... more This paper reports the results of an attempt to recover the ®rstorder subgrouping of the Indo-European family using a new computational method devised by the authors and based on à perfect phylogeny' algorithm. The methodology is also brie¯y described, and points of theory and methodology are addressed in connection with the experiment whose results are here reported.
Researchers interested in the history of the Indo-European family of languages have used a variet... more Researchers interested in the history of the Indo-European family of languages have used a variety of methods to estimate the phylogeny of the family, and have obtained widely differing results. In this paper we explore the reconstructions of the Indo-European phylogeny obtained by using the major phylogeny estimation procedures on an existing database of 336 characters (including lexical, phonological, and morphological characters) for 24 Indo-European languages.
We propose several models of how languages evolve, and discuss statistical estimation of evolutio... more We propose several models of how languages evolve, and discuss statistical estimation of evolution under these models. We also discuss issues of identifiability and statistical consistency under these models.
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Papers by Don Ringe