[Mvandenbergh]

It seems to me that at least 50% of this controversy is a culture clash between computational linguists and historical linguists.

It's a little odd to describe the Rao paper as using time-tested logic and math when the idea of conditional entropy as an indicator of whether a given symbol system is linguistic is in no way time-tested. I'm not a professional linguist, and it may well be a valid and interesting technique, but it is not time-tested.

[JoeAltmaier]

How do you time-test models with a strictly limited and static set of test cases? Any scheme would suffer from over-training. Maybe we have to evaluate approaches using logic and math e.g. conditional entropy to attack problems spaces like this.