Philological Probability Problems

Recent Developments in Theoretical and Quantitative Taxonomy

“…These methods have been successfully applied in many groups of organisms, such as insects (Michener and Sokal, 1957), man (Cain and Harrison, 1960a), plants (Rogers and Tanimoto, 1960;Morishima and Oka, 1960), and bacteria (Sneath, 1957b;Sneath and Cowan, 1958;Hill, 1959;Cheeseman and Berridge, 1959;Liston and Colwell, 1960;Talbot and Sneath, 1960;Pohja, 1960;Bojalil and Cerbon, 1961;Colwell and Liston, 1961). This is not the place to describe in detail the methods, but, briefly, all of them are based on elementary forms of multivariate analysis, a technique which has been principally used in psychology, and in ecology (e.g., Goodall, 1953;Williams and Lambert, 1959) and also, interestingly enough, in linguistics (Ross, 1950). All of the methods compare every organism with every other organism in the study, and then produce a figure which represents an estimate of overall similarity for each of the comparisons between pairs of organisms.…”

A Non-Parametric Approach to the Change-Point Problem

“…The Lindisfarne Scribes' data refer to data given originally by Ross (1950) and subsequently analysed by Silvey (1956). The data refer to the number of occurrences of present indicative third person singular endings "-s" and "-8" for different sections of Lindisfarne.…”

How Many Is Enough?—Statistical Principles for Lexicostatistics

“…Among the available probability approaches adopted to do this task, such as Chi-square calculations (Ross, 1950; Kessler, 2001), Binomial approach (Ringe, 1992) and Shift test (Oswalt, 1971), our statistical principle follows Ringe's Binomial approach. This approach explicitly assigns the meaning to the parameter p (probability for two segments to exhibit a sound correspondence).…”