User talk:AkselGerner

Talk if you want.--AkselGerner (talk) 23:42, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Linguistics
Hey! Interesting discussions on the proto-scandinavian article. You're danish, right? Where do you study? And how on earth did you end up knowing how to speak finnish? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Alexlykke (talk • contribs) 23:08, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

That's very interesting to hear. I see your point, about the finnish, but you've got to admit that english is somewaht more mainstream, eh? I have a friend who speaks finnish, and he says that they have 100 % grapho-phonological correlation; that's gotta be swell, especially if you're a foreigner learning the language. And by the, don't start a Norwegian on the "strangeness" of the danish language... Hehe, anyways, so the real question seems to be: how did you end up studying in Finland?--Alexlykke (talk) 21:03, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Swadesh list
Your contribution from March 1st has some issues in its form and content relative to Wikipedia guidelines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Swadesh_list&diff=195183492&oldid=190570620

Your recent additions fall into the tone of a personal essay in places, rather than striking an encyclopedic tone. Nor is it clear that the controversy stemming from this paper deserves this much space in an article about Swadesh lists.

I'm not especially qualified to wade into this, but I did do a bit of quick background reading.


 * http://books.google.ca/books?id=QBFPiT4dUQQC&pg=PA197&lpg=PA197&dq=gray+and+atkinson&source=web&ots=08ZSgRCDs4&sig=IG9ZbCreoSbyXqE8voynwWlvU3w&hl=en#PPA197,M1
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Swadesh_list&diff=195183492&oldid=190570620
 * http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000208.html
 * http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000210.html
 * http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940CE0DE1631F935A25750C0A9629C8B63

These articles provide a much deeper insight into how G&A handled the cognate sets associated with the 1994 Swadesh lists. I didn't spot much in these criticism making a big deal that language evolution does not conform to discrete, generational inheritance.

The criticism was far stronger on the problems associated with inconsistent change rates. Biologists seem to think they have tamed this problem; linguists remain unconvinced. His tree, Dr. Gray said, was derived with the methods used by biologists to avoid problems identical to those in glottochronology. Genes, like languages, do not mutate at a constant rate. And organisms, particularly bacteria, often borrow genes rather than inheriting them from a common ancestor. Biologists have also learned that trees of any great complexity cannot be drawn up by subjective methods. Mathematical methods are required, like having a computer generate all possible trees -- a number that quickly runs way beyond the trillions -- and then deciding statistically which class of trees is more probable than the rest.

Uncertainty associated with the Swadesh list itself does not seem to be very strong: Many of the Dyen list cognates are marked uncertain, so Dr. Gray was able to test whether omission of the doubtful cognates made any difference (it did not). He also tested many other possible assumptions, but none of them produced an age for proto-Indo-European anywhere near the date of 6,000 years ago favored by linguists.

Finally, it's not a weakness in the study that every possible outcome has already been predicted by one party or another. That makes no logical sense. It just means you can't use the prediction that results to corroborate the success of the model against standing consensus.

In fact, making extra predictions is a strength of the paper, as it permits falsification of the paper if a future consensus is reached (e.g. concerning time and place of Indo-European homelands) in contradiction to the arguments of the paper.

Are you up to taking another pass at this, with less prose, more particulars, and more sourced statements? You're probably more qualified that I am to make this contribution, if you adopt a more encyclopedic tone. MaxEnt (talk) 23:58, 22 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Your new revision is a lot more defensible in the context of Wikipedia. What would help now is more precise information about exactly how the 200 word Swadesh was used.  The quotes above suggest G&A were well aware of the deficiencies of the list used, but don't believe the results of their method was especially sensitive to those deficiencies.


 * I did some work once in statistical NLP. In my view, the Swadesh lists are a rather crude concept.  What you would like to have in an analysis where each root is described by a reliability coefficient (or two, or more, if reliability has multiple dimensions).  The discrete notion "on the list" / "not on the list" is kind of silly for this kind of mathematics.


 * As we learn more about how the brain processes language, I suspect we'll come up with some functional constraints on the structure of working vocabulary. In English, if you say "This Thai soup is hot" it leads mostly to confusion.  I suspect one of the change forces on vocabulary is to eliminate inadvertent garden-path comprehension mistakes.  In some cases where I mishear a word at the beginning of a sentence, by the time I figure out that I've done so, my mental "capture" is so garbled I have to ask for a full repeat.  That kind of effect would place heavy constraints on potentially misleading homonyms in a language's core vocabulary.  I suspect the model would need to be primarily neurological to add this exclusion force as a constraint to these reconstructions, which is not to suggest the model would be feasible to compute supposed one could specify these constraints.  It's unclear what the limit of the technique might be without pursuing many difficult refinements.


 * Having thought about this for a day, my feeling is that this is work that needed to be done, I wouldn't myself get too hung up over the particular tree or timeline predicted by G&A, and I would be more intrigued by their sensitivity analysis than the tree they have reconstructed. As far as I read of the links above, it appears their disclosure of their sensitivity analysis was limited to a few remarks.


 * http://life.lithoguru.com/index.php?itemid=119

MaxEnt (talk) 05:06, 24 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Just out today: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/03/new_face_recognition which is an excellent point of comparison on the relative power of sparse vs specific analysis.

"The academic community is really upset," he says. "It sounds terrible. You don't care what features you choose? It flies in the face of many years of research." MaxEnt (talk) 17:43, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Old Norse in Finland
Thanks for commenting. I hadn't noticed that the editor had been doing that. Your comment is interesting, as I hadn't thought of such settlements. Typically, from the sagas I have read, Finns are strange, often magical people that others are frightened of. I should also point out that the Old Norse page the map doesn't really have next to any of Finland highlighted, which I suppose should be attributed to coastal settlements, rather than widespread use. I had heard of a Finnish Medieval epic (the name of which escapes me, perhaps you can help?), which I assume would have been composed in Finnish. Ironically, the Scandinavia page states, "The other Nordic countries, Finland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands, are sometimes included because of their close historic and cultural connections to Denmark, Norway and Sweden." I generally include Finland, too. When I was at the Vikingeskibsmuseet in Roskilde last March, the tour guide made it a point to exclude Finland. Is this a result of Danish/Finnish relations (of which I know next to nothing of) or just this particular tour guide? Anyway, thanks for the information, and nice talking with you. Vincent Valentine||talk to me! 14:57, 24 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Most enlightening. Thanks a lot for the message.  I will have to read Väinämöinen this summer, when I've got some spare time.  My Old Norse teacher told me that he highly recommended it, and it sounds really interesting.  I have always wanted to know more about Finland.  I wasn't even very much aware of the Saami people, but now I will endeavor to do more reading on the subject.  I think it would be a lot of fun to travel to Finland someday.  Thanks a ton for your knowledge and help.  Vincent Valentine 00:38, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Speedy deletion of 194.83.177.252
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Speedy deletion of 194.83.177.252
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April 2008
Just a note to say please don't create articles on specific users (particularly IP addresses). If you want to report a user, please do so here. For note, it's not essential for an editor to have a username, and not "illegal" not to do so. Booglamay (talk) 22:02, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

194.83.177.252
Hi. I've deleted the page you've created, 194.83.177.252 a couple of times now. If you're trying to report User: 194.83.177.252 for vandalism, you're doing it the wrong way. I'm guessing you're meaning to report that editor on Administrator intervention against vandalism. If you're trying to do something else and you need help, leave a note on my talk page and I'll see what I can do. Toddst1 (talk) 22:03, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

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Abuse
Re-read the section on the abuse page titled "New alerts" and make sure to be careful about section 3, you need to place the abuse report on that actual abuse page with the instructions. If you still need help just let me know.--Torchwood Who? (talk) 22:08, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Reporting Vandals, removing warnings on your page, etc
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Thanks
Thanks Aksel for defending the Sami people "History of racist scientific..." paragraph. I'll come up with those sources shortly that I described before. Take Care. Dinkytown (talk) 20:24, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Dik's FG
Hi Aksel,

I happen to work at the Amsterdam linguistics department, so if you need references on FG, I should easily be able to provide you with an electronic version of any article. BTW, I think the reference you were looking for is Hengeveld's "Layered structure of the clause", 1989 I believe. Although that is more on Tense, Aspect, Mood etc, IIRC Cheers Jasy jatere (talk) 08:18, 14 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Since you are Danish and a linguist, you should have come across Jan Rijkhoff, haven't you? Anyway, he has a book called "The Noun Phrase", where you should find the diagrams you need. Jasy jatere (talk) 07:21, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

WP:NOT
Please note that wikipedia is not a discussion forum; as long as User:Beleg Strongbow's user and talk page is within the limits of WP:UP (several admins and other editors have indicated they believe it so) there's no real reason to debate and is often counter-productive. I find his statements distasteful but as long as there's no soapboxing or non-neutral editing, it's allowable. Just my opinion and you're free to ignore it. WLU (talk) 14:57, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Old Norwegian Merger
I think that's a fair compromise. As for fleshing the articles out, I might be able to help a bit in a few weeks as I will be on summer break in two weeks. However, as I am sure you are aware, expectations and reality do not always coincide, and I might get bogged down, but I'll do my best. When do you propose action be taken? Best, Vincent Valentine 23:52, 23 April 2008 (UTC)