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Glottochronology
Glottochronology (from Attic Greek γλῶττα ''tongue, language'' and χρόνος ''time'') is the part of lexicostatistics which involves comparative linguistics and deals with the chronological relationship between languages.Sheila Embleton (1992). Historical Linguistics: Mathematical concepts. In W. Bright (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Linguistics The idea was developed by Morris Swadesh in the 1950s in his article on Salish internal relationships. He developed the idea under two assumptions: there indeed exists a relatively stable ''basic vocabulary'' (referred to as ''Swadesh lists'') in all languages of the world; and, any replacements happen in a way analogous to radioactive decay in a constant percentage per time elapsed. Using mathematics and statistics, Swadesh developed an equation that could determine when languages separated and give an approximate time of when the separation occurred. His methods aid linguistic anthropologists by giving them a definitive way ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Swadesh List
The Swadesh list ("Swadesh" is pronounced ) is a classic compilation of tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. Translations of the Swadesh list into a set of languages allow researchers to quantify the interrelatedness of those languages. The Swadesh list is named after linguist Morris Swadesh. It is used in lexicostatistics (the quantitative assessment of the genealogical relatedness of languages) and glottochronology (the dating of language divergence). Because there are several different lists, some authors also refer to "Swadesh lists". Versions and authors Morris Swadesh himself created several versions of his list. He started with a list of 215 meanings (falsely introduced as a list of 225 meanings in the paper due to a spelling error), which he reduced to 165 words for the Salish-Spokane-Kalispel language. In 1952, he published a list of 215 meanings,Swadesh 1952: 456–PDF/ref> of which he suggested the removal of 16 for being unclear or not ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quantitative Comparative Linguistics
Quantitative comparative linguistics is the use of quantitative analysis as applied to comparative linguistics. Examples include the statistical fields of lexicostatistics and glottochronology, and the borrowing of phylogenetics from biology. History Statistical methods have been used for the purpose of quantitative analysis in comparative linguistics for more than a century. During the 1950s, the Swadesh list emerged: a standardised set of lexical concepts found in most languages, as words or phrases, that allow two or more languages to be compared and contrasted empirically. Probably the first published quantitative historical linguistics study was by Sapir in 1916, while Kroeber and Chretien in 1937 investigated nine Indo-European (IE) languages using 74 morphological and phonological features (extended in 1939 by the inclusion of Hittite). Ross in 1950 carried out an investigation into the theoretical basis for such studies. Swadesh, using word lists, developed lexicosta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Morris Swadesh
Morris Swadesh (; January 22, 1909 – July 20, 1967) was an American linguist who specialized in comparative and historical linguistics. Swadesh was born in Massachusetts to Bessarabian Jewish immigrant parents. He completed bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Chicago, studying under Edward Sapir, and then followed Sapir to Yale University where he completed a Ph.D. in 1933. Swadesh taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1937 to 1939, and then during World War II worked on projects with the United States Army and Office of Strategic Services. He became a professor at the City College of New York after the war's end, but was fired in 1949 due to his membership in the Communist Party. He spent most of the rest of his life teaching in Mexico and Canada. Swadesh had a particular interest in the indigenous languages of the Americas, and conducted extensive fieldwork throughout North America. He was one of the pioneers of glottochronology and lexicosta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Lees (linguist)
Robert B. Lees (9 July 1922 – 6 December 1996) was an American linguist. Education Lees went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956 to work on its machine translation project. He first came to notice with an influential review of Noam Chomsky's '' Syntactic Structures'' (1957) and with his 1960 book ''The Grammar of English Nominalizations''. Lees was later dismissed from his research position by Victor Yngve, as Lees had wanted to continue working on straight linguistics rather than on machine translation. He then enrolled in the electrical engineering department at MIT, from which he obtained his Ph.D. in linguistics under Chomsky. Career Lees was the first Head of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, serving from 1965 to 1968. In 1969, Lees moved to Israel to teach at Tel Aviv University, and he established the university's linguistics department in 1970. Lees also went to India on a tour under the patronization of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lexicostatistics
Lexicostatistics is a method of comparative linguistics that involves comparing the percentage of lexical cognates between languages to determine their relationship. Lexicostatistics is related to the comparative method but does not reconstruct a proto-language. It is to be distinguished from glottochronology, which attempts to use lexicostatistical methods to estimate the length of time since two or more languages diverged from a common earlier proto-language. This is merely one application of lexicostatistics, however; other applications of it may not share the assumption of a constant rate of change for basic lexical items. The term "lexicostatistics" is misleading in that mathematical equations are used but not statistics. Other features of a language may be used other than the lexicon, though this is unusual. Whereas the comparative method used shared identified innovations to determine sub-groups, lexicostatistics does not identify these. Lexicostatistics is a distance-based m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lexicostatistics
Lexicostatistics is a method of comparative linguistics that involves comparing the percentage of lexical cognates between languages to determine their relationship. Lexicostatistics is related to the comparative method but does not reconstruct a proto-language. It is to be distinguished from glottochronology, which attempts to use lexicostatistical methods to estimate the length of time since two or more languages diverged from a common earlier proto-language. This is merely one application of lexicostatistics, however; other applications of it may not share the assumption of a constant rate of change for basic lexical items. The term "lexicostatistics" is misleading in that mathematical equations are used but not statistics. Other features of a language may be used other than the lexicon, though this is unusual. Whereas the comparative method used shared identified innovations to determine sub-groups, lexicostatistics does not identify these. Lexicostatistics is a distance-based m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Historical Linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include: # to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages # to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and to determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families ( comparative linguistics) # to develop general theories about how and why language changes # to describe the history of speech communities # to study the history of words, i.e. etymology Historical linguistics is founded on the Uniformitarian Principle, which is defined by linguist Donald Ringe as: History and development Western modern historical linguistics dates from the late-18th century. It grew out of the earlier discipline of philology, the study of ancient texts and documents dating back to antiquity. At first, historical linguistics served as the cornerstone of comparative linguistics, primarily as a t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Afro-Asiatic Languages
The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, Erythraean or Lisramic, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic subregions of Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahara/Sahel. With the exception of its Semitic branch, all branches of the Afroasiatic family are exclusively native to the African continent. Afroasiatic languages have over 500 million native speakers, which is the fourth-largest number of native speakers of any language family (after Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, and Niger–Congo). The phylum has six branches: Berber languages, Berber, Chadic languages, Chadic, Cushitic languages, Cushitic, Egyptian language, Egyptian, Semitic languages, Semitic, and Omotic languages, Omotic. The most widely spoken modern Afroasiatic language or dialect continuum by far is Arabic, a ''de facto'' group of Varieties of Arabi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indo-European Studies
Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics and an interdisciplinary field of study dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. The goal of those engaged in these studies is to amass information about the hypothetical proto-language from which all of these languages are descended, a language dubbed Proto-Indo-European (PIE), and its speakers, the Proto-Indo-Europeans, including their society and Proto-Indo-European mythology. The studies cover where the language originated and how it spread. This article also lists Indo-European scholars, centres, journals and book series. Naming The term ''Indo-European'' itself now current in English literature, was coined in 1813 by the British scholar Sir Thomas Young, although at that time, there was no consensus as to the naming of the recently discovered language family. However, he seems to have used it as a geographical term, to indicate the newly proposed language family in Eurasia spanning from the Indian subco ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Leipzig–Jakarta List
The Leipzig–Jakarta list of 100 words is used by linguistics, linguists to test the degree of chronological separation of languages by comparing words that are resistant to loan word, borrowing. The Leipzig–Jakarta list became available in 2009. In the 1950s, the linguist Morris Swadesh published a list of 200 words called the Swadesh list, allegedly the 200 lexical concepts found in all languages that were least likely to be borrowed from other languages. Swadesh later whittled his list down to 100 items. The Swadesh list, however, was based mainly on intuition, according to Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor.Haspelmath & Tadmor, p. 72. The Loanword Typology Project, with the World Loanword Database (WOLD), published by the Max Planck Digital Library, was established to rectify this problem. Experts on 41 languages from across the world were given a uniform vocabulary list and asked to provide the words for each item in the language on which they were an expert, as well as in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Attic Greek
Attic Greek is the Greek language, Greek dialect of the regions of ancient Greece, ancient region of Attica, including the ''polis'' of classical Athens, Athens. Often called classical Greek, it was the prestige (sociolinguistics), prestige dialect of the Hellenistic period, Greek world for centuries and remains the standard form of the language that is taught to students of ancient Greek. As the basis of the Hellenistic Koine Greek, Koine, it is the most similar of the ancient Greek dialects, ancient dialects to later Greek. Attic is traditionally classified as a member or sister dialect of the Ionic Greek, Ionic branch. Origin and range Greek language, Greek is the primary member of the Hellenic languages, Hellenic branch of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family. In ancient times, Greek had already come to exist in several dialects, one of which was Attic. The earliest Attested language, attestations of Greek, dating from the 16th to 11th centuries BC, are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mass Lexical Comparison
Mass comparison is a method developed by Joseph Greenberg to determine the level of genetic relatedness between languages. It is now usually called multilateral comparison. The method is rejected by most linguists , though not all. Some of the top-level relationships Greenberg named are now generally accepted, though they had already been posited by others (e.g. Afro-Asiatic and Niger–Congo). Others are accepted by many though disputed by some prominent specialists (e.g. Nilo-Saharan), others are predominantly rejected but have some defenders (e.g. Eurasiatic), while others are almost universally rejected (e.g. Khoisan and Amerind). Methodology The thesis of mass comparison is that a group of languages is related when they show numerous resemblances in vocabulary, including pronouns, and morphemes, forming an interlocking pattern common to the group. Unlike the comparative method, mass comparison does not require any regular or systematic correspondences between the languag ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
