Notes to Kluge

1. I would like to thank Sandra Lee of SIL International and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on this paper.

2. In general, all language names are spelled using the Latin alphabet and without diacritics. For a more complete listing of alternative spellings see Kluge 2000:88.

3. Capo (1986) lists neither a distinct Fon nor a distinct Gen variety (see section 2.3). For the current study, however, word lists were elicited in the Fon and Gen varieties (see section 4).

4. MDS provides for each configuration two measures to test the results for reliability and validity: (1) a measure of stress (“Kruskal’s stress”) to measure how well the derived configuration matches the input data, and (2) the “squared simple correlation” (RSQ) to determine what proportion of variance of the scaled data can be accounted for by the MDS procedure. For Kruskal’s measure of stress, small values approaching 0.0 indicate an acceptable goodness of fit, whereas RSQ values of ≥0.60 are generally considered acceptable.

5.Eastern Gbe varieties that are indicated as Phla-Phera varieties by only one of the two MDS plots are listed in parenthesis.