We welcome Gerhard Jäger’s framing of Computational Historical Linguistics: its history and background, its goals and ambitions as well as the concrete implementation by Jäger himself. As Jäger explains (pp. 151–153), the comparative method can be broken down into seven steps and there have been attempts to formalise/automatise (some of) the steps since the 1950s. However, Jäger contrasts the work in the 1960–2000s on various steps as “mostly constituting isolated efforts” and, in contrast, characterises the biologically inspired work of the 2000s as a “major impetus”. It is difficult to find the motivation for this division as the latter group, like the former, also concern themselves with only a subpart of the comparative method and, furthermore, rely fundamentally on subjective cognate judgments done by humans (as also acknowledged by Jäger later, pp. 156–157).

中文翻译：

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论21世纪的计算历史语言学

我们欢迎格哈德·雅格（GerhardJäger）对计算历史语言学的构架：其历史和背景，其目标和抱负以及雅格本人的具体实现。正如雅格（Jäger）所解释的（第151-153页），比较方法可以分为七个步骤，自1950年代以来，人们一直在尝试使步骤中的某些步骤形式化/自动化。然而，贾格将1960-2000年代在各个步骤上的工作进行了对比，认为“主要是孤立的努力”，相反，他将2000年代受到生物学启发的作品描述为“主要动力”。很难找到这种划分的动机，因为后者就像前者一样，只关注比较方法的一个子部分，此外，