Re: OT: Chance resemblances...

Muke Tever wrote, quoting Robert Jung:

> > Japanese <yoi> (/joi/ "good") reminds me of Hungarian /jo:/ (<jo'>). Is
> > this a case of "chance resemblance" (as Mark Rosenfelder calls the
> > looking-alike of Chinese <ren1> and Quechua <runa>, "person") or is
> > there a connection?
>
> Odds are remarkably slim.  Japanese /j/ has a tendency to descend from *d,
> for one, and is most likely not in the same family as Hungarian to begin
> with.
I cited Rosenfelder's article (several of Rosenfelder's articles,
actually) in the paper I wrote for university last year (on
applications of data mining in linguistics).

Whilst motivating the concept of chance resemblances, I used the
example of "knowledge" versus "college". I toyed with using
"uninteresting" vs "university" but did not wish this to be taken as
a slight! :-)

The relevance for my paper was that section 4.4 discussed both the
feasibility of, and the most likely interpretations of the results of,
scanning a linguistic database via an automated procedure (i.e. a
modified version of association rule mining) to generate association
rules such as "90% of languages have at least five words that sound
something like X and mean something to do with Y".

Also in conjunction with the same section, I would have very much
liked to have read the full version of
http://www.szp.swets.nl/szp/journals/ql062167.htm but could not get
access to the journal.

Adrian.

Reply