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Lexicostatistic
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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Swadesh List
A Swadesh list () is a compilation of cultural universal, tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. That is, a Swadesh list is a list of forms and concepts which all languages, without exception, have terms for, such as star, hand, water, kill, sleep, and so forth. The number of such terms is small – a few hundred at most, or possibly less than a hundred. The inclusion or exclusion of many terms is subject to debate among linguists; thus, there are several different lists, and some authors may refer to "Swadesh lists." The Swadesh list is named after linguist Morris Swadesh. Translations of a Swadesh list into a set of languages allow for researchers to quantify the interrelatedness of those languages. Swadesh lists are used in lexicostatistics (the quantitative assessment of the genealogical relatedness of languages) and glottochronology (the dating of language divergence). For instance, the terms on a Swadesh list can be compared between two languages ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 to determine when languages separated and give an approximate time of when the separation occurred. His methods aimed to aid linguistic anthropologists by giving them a defini ... [...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, and developed his mature career at UNAM in Mexico. 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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Comparative Linguistics
Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness. Genetic relatedness implies a common origin or proto-language and comparative linguistics aims to construct language families, to reconstruct proto-languages and specify the changes that have resulted in the documented languages. To maintain a clear distinction between attested and reconstructed forms, comparative linguists prefix an asterisk to any form that is not found in surviving texts. A number of methods for carrying out language classification have been developed, ranging from simple inspection to computerised hypothesis testing. Such methods have gone through a long process of development. Methods The fundamental technique of comparative linguistics is to compare phonological systems, morphological systems, syntax and the lexicon of two or more languages using techniques such as the comparative method. In principle, eve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joseph Kruskal
Joseph Bernard Kruskal, Jr. (; January 29, 1928 – September 19, 2010) was an American mathematician, statistician, computer scientist and psychometrician. Personal life Kruskal was born to a Jewish family in New York City to a successful fur wholesaler, Joseph B. Kruskal, Sr. His mother, Lillian Rose Vorhaus Kruskal Oppenheimer, became a noted promoter of origami during the early era of television. Kruskal had two notable brothers, Martin David Kruskal, co-inventor of solitons, and William Kruskal, who developed the Kruskal–Wallis one-way analysis of variance. One of Joseph Kruskal's nephews is notable computer scientist and professor Clyde Kruskal. Education and career He was a student at the University of Chicago earning a bachelor of science in mathematics in 1948, and a master of science in mathematics in the following year. After his time at the University of Chicago Kruskal attended Princeton University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1954, nominally under ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Austronesian Languages
The Austronesian languages ( ) are a language family widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and Taiwan (by Taiwanese indigenous peoples). They are spoken by about 328 million people (4.4% of the world population). This makes it the fifth-largest language family by number of speakers. Major Austronesian languages include Malay (around 250–270 million in Indonesia alone in its own literary standard named " Indonesian"), Javanese, Sundanese, Tagalog (standardized as Filipino), Malagasy and Cebuano. According to some estimates, the family contains 1,257 languages, which is the second most of any language family. In 1706, the Dutch scholar Adriaan Reland first observed similarities between the languages spoken in the Malay Archipelago and by peoples on islands in the Pacific Ocean. In the 19th century, researchers (e.g. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Herman van der Tuuk) started to apply the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Isidore Dyen
Isidore Dyen (16 August 1913 in Philadelphia – 14 December 2008 in Newton, Massachusetts) was an American linguist, Professor Emeritus of Malayo-Polynesian and Comparative Linguistics at Yale University. He was one of the foremost scholars in the field of Austronesian linguistics, publishing extensively on the reconstruction of Proto-Austronesian phonology and on subgrouping within the language family, the latter principally by means of lexicostatistics. The youngest son of a rabbi and his wife who had immigrated from Kiev, Ukraine, "Iz" (as he was known to friends) grew up speaking Yiddish at home and studying Hebrew at Gratz College in preparation for rabbinical training. However, during the course of earning a B.A. in 1933, an M.A. in 1934, and a Ph.D. in 1939 at the University of Pennsylvania, his interests shifted to comparative linguistics. After completing a dissertation on "The Sanskrit indeclinables of the Hindu grammarians and lexicographers" he planned to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Leipzig–Jakarta List
The Leipzig–Jakarta list of 100 words is used by linguists to test the degree of chronological separation of languages by comparing words that are resistant to borrowing. The Leipzig–Jakarta list became available in 2009. The word list is named after the cities of Leipzig, Germany, and Jakarta, Indonesia, the places where the list was conceived and created. 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. In origin, the words in the Swadesh lists were chosen for their universal, culturally independent availability in as many languages as possible, regardless of their "stability". Nevertheless, the stability of the resulting list ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Taboo
A taboo is a social group's ban, prohibition or avoidance of something (usually an utterance or behavior) based on the group's sense that it is excessively repulsive, offensive, sacred or allowed only for certain people.''Encyclopædia Britannica Online''.Taboo. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012. Retrieved 21 Mar. 2012 Such prohibitions are present in virtually all societies. Taboos may be prohibited explicitly, for example within a legal system or religion, or implicitly, for example by social norms or conventions followed by a particular culture or organization. Taboos are often meant to protect the individual, but there are other reasons for their development. An ecological or medical background is apparent in many, including some that are seen as religious or spiritual in origin. Taboos can help use a resource more efficiently, but when applied to only a subsection of the community they can also serve to suppress said subsection of the community. A taboo acknowledged by a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Loanword
A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term that is well established in the linguistic field despite its acknowledged descriptive flaws: nothing is taken away from the donor language and there is no expectation of returning anything (i.e., the loanword). Loanwords may be contrasted with calques, in which a word is borrowed into the recipient language by being directly translated from the donor language rather than being adopted in (an approximation of) its original form. They must also be distinguished from cognates, which are words in two or more related languages that are similar because they share an etymological origin in the ancestral language, rather than because one borrowed the word from the other. Examples and related terms A loanword is distinguished from a calque (or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lexical Similarity
In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. A lexical similarity of 1 (or 100%) would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words. There are different ways to define the lexical similarity and the results vary accordingly. For example, ''Ethnologue''s method of calculation consists of comparing a regionally standardized wordlist (comparable to the Swadesh list) and counting those forms that show similarity in both form and meaning. Using such a method, English was evaluated to have a lexical similarity of 60% with German and 27% with French. Lexical similarity can be used to evaluate the degree of genetic relationship between two languages. Percentages higher than 85% usually indicate that the two languages being compared are likely to be related dialects. The lexical similarity is only one indication of the mutual intelligibility of the two languages, since t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
African Languages
The number of languages natively spoken in Africa is variously estimated (depending on the delineation of language vs. dialect) at between 1,250 and 2,100, and by some counts at over 3,000. Nigeria alone has over 500 languages (according to SIL Ethnologue), one of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in the world. The languages of Africa belong to many distinct language families, among which the largest are: * Niger–Congo, which include the large Atlantic-Congo and Bantu branches in West, Central, Southeast and Southern Africa. *Afroasiatic languages are spread throughout Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and parts of the Sahel. * Saharan, Nilotic and Central Sudanic languages (previously grouped under the hypothetical Nilo-Saharan macro-family), are present in East Africa and Sahel. *Austronesian languages are spoken in Madagascar and parts of the Comoros. * Khoe–Kwadi languages are spoken mostly in Namibia and Botswana. *Indo-European ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
