Re: Density of Language Taxa

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