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Mathematically-Based Approaches The need for an external control on the comparative method has long been felt, and the most obvious place to find such a mechanism has been mathematically-based approaches which are specifically designed to check the results of traditionally-based analyses. This development is somewhat radical for traditional historical linguists, who are mainly educated in the philological tradition, with its emphasis on texts and qualitative analysis. Inspired initially by the need to address the problem of chance in mass-comparison methodology, Ringe was among the first philologically-trained linguists to introduce quantitative controls on the supremely qualitative comparative method (1992). Working later with Warnow and Taylor, Ringe advanced his studies to address matters of dating, tree-construction and the optimization of branching and subgrouping schemes for language families such as Indo-European (2002). This research line has generated other mathematically-based approaches such as Kessler's (2001) introduction of probability models for testing meaning lists in lexicostatistics. The result has been an objectification of many heretofore subjective procedures, with interesting results which both affirm and refute traditional analyses, such as Ringe, Warnow and Taylor's (2002) demonstration that Greek and Armenian are close to each other on a tree of IE languages. |