HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

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 In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards t ...
but does not reconstruct a
proto-language In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattes ...
. It is to be distinguished from
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 ...
, 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 method, whereas the comparative method considers language characters directly. The lexicostatistics method is a simple and fast technique relative to the comparative method but has limitations (discussed below). It can be validated by cross-checking the trees produced by both methods.


History

Lexicostatistics was developed by Morris Swadesh in a series of articles in the 1950s, based on earlier ideas. The concept's first known use was by
Dumont d'Urville Jules Sébastien César Dumont d'Urville (; 23 May 1790 – 8 May 1842) was a French explorer and naval officer who explored the south and western Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica. As a botanist and cartographer, he gave his nam ...
in 1834 who compared various "Oceanic" languages and proposed a method for calculating a coefficient of relationship. Hymes (1960) and Embleton (1986) both review the history of lexicostatistics.


Method


Create word list

The aim is to generate a list of universally used meanings (hand, mouth, sky, I). Words are then collected for these meaning slots for each language being considered. Swadesh reduced a larger set of meanings down to 200 originally. He later found that it was necessary to reduce it further but that he could include some meanings that were not in his original list, giving his later 100-item list. The
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 interrelatednes ...
in Wiktionary gives the total 207 meanings in a number of languages. Alternative lists that apply more rigorous criteria have been generated, e.g. the Dolgopolsky list and the Leipzig–Jakarta list, as well as lists with a more specific scope; for example, Dyen, Kruskal and Black have 200 meanings for 84
Indo-European languages The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...
in digital form.


Determine cognacies

A trained and experienced linguist is needed to make cognacy decisions. However, the decisions may need to be refined as the state of knowledge increases. However, lexicostatistics does not rely on all the decisions being correct. For each pair of lists the cognacy of a form could be positive, negative or indeterminate. Sometimes a language has multiple words for one meaning, e.g. ''small'' and ''little'' for ''not big''.


Calculate lexicostatistic percentages

This percentage is related to the proportion of meanings for a particular language pair that are cognate, i.e. relative to the total without indeterminacy. This value is entered into a N x N table of distances, where N is the number of languages being compared. When complete this table is half-filled in
triangular A triangle is a polygon with three edges and three vertices. It is one of the basic shapes in geometry. A triangle with vertices ''A'', ''B'', and ''C'' is denoted \triangle ABC. In Euclidean geometry, any three points, when non- collinea ...
form. The higher the proportion of cognacy the closer the languages are related.


Create family tree

Creation of the language tree is based solely on the table found above. Various sub-grouping methods can be used but that adopted by Dyen, Krustal and Black was: * all lists are placed in a pool * the two closest members are removed and form a nucleus which is placed in the pool * this step is repeated * under certain conditions a nucleus becomes a group * this is repeated until the pool only contains one group. Calculations have to be of nucleus and group lexical percentages.


Applications

A leading exponent of lexicostatistics application has been Isidore Dyen. He used lexicostatistics to classify Austronesian languages as well as
Indo-European The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...
ones. A major study of the latter was reported by Dyen, Kruskal and Black (1992). Studies have also been carried out on
Amerindian The Indigenous peoples of the Americas are the inhabitants of the Americas before the arrival of the European settlers in the 15th century, and the ethnic groups who now identify themselves with those peoples. Many Indigenous peoples of the A ...
and
African languages The languages of Africa are divided into several major language families: * Niger–Congo or perhaps Atlantic–Congo languages (includes Bantu and non-Bantu, and possibly Mande and others) are spoken in West, Central, Southeast and Souther ...
.


Pama-Nyungan

The question of internal branching within the Pama-Nyungan language family has been a long-standing issue within Australianist linguistics, and general consensus held that internal connections between the 25+ different subgroups of Pama-Nyungan were either impossible to reconstruct or that the subgroups were not in fact genetically related at all. In 2012, Claire Bowern and Quentin Atkinson published the results from their application of computational phylogenetic methods on 19
doculects
representing all major subgroups and isolates of Pama-Nyungan. Their model "recovered" many of the branches and divisions that had erstwhile been proposed and accepted by many other Australianists, while also providing some insight into the more problematic branches, such as Paman (which is complicated by the lack of data) and Ngumpin-Yapa (where the genetic picture is obscured by very high rates of borrowing between languages). Their dataset forms the largest of its kind for a hunter-gatherer language family, and the second largest overall after Austronesian
Greenhill et al. 2008
). They conclude that Pama-Nyungan languages are in fact not exceptional to lexicostatistical methods, which have successfully been applied to other language families of the world.


Criticisms

People such as Hoijer (1956) have showed that there were difficulties in finding equivalents to the meaning items while many have found it necessary to modify Swadesh's lists. Gudschinsky (1956) questioned whether it was possible to obtain a universal list. Factors such as borrowing, tradition and
taboo A taboo or tabu 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, sacred, or allowed only for certain persons.''Encyclopædia Britannica ...
can skew the results, as with other methods. Sometimes lexicostatistics has been used with
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. ...
being used rather than cognacy to find resemblances. This is then equivalent to
mass 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 to ...
. The choice of meaning slots is subjective, as is the choice of synonyms.


Improved methods

Some of the modern computational statistical hypothesis testing methods can be regarded as improvements of lexicostatistics in that they use similar word lists and distance measures.


See also

*
Basic English Basic English (British American Scientific International and Commercial English) is an English-based controlled language created by the linguist and philosopher Charles Kay Ogden as an international auxiliary language, and as an aid for teach ...
* Cognate * Comparative linguistics *
Comparative method In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards t ...
* Global Lexicostatistical Database *
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 ...
*
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 # ...
*
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 pro ...
* Intercontinental Dictionary Series *
Linguistic distance Linguistic distance is how different one language or dialect is from another. Although they lack a uniform approach to quantifying linguistic distance between languages, practitioners of linguistics use the concept in a variety of linguistic situat ...
* Mass lexical comparison *
Proto-language In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattes ...
*
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 interrelatednes ...
*
Word list A word list (or ''lexicon'') is a list of a language's lexicon (generally sorted by frequency of occurrence either by levels or as a ranked list) within some given text corpus, serving the purpose of vocabulary acquisition. A lexicon sorted by ...


References


Further reading

* Dobson, Annette (1969). Lexicostatistical Grouping. Anthropological Linguistics 7, 216-221. * Dobson, Annette and Black, Paul (1979). Multidimensional Scaling of some Lexicostatistical Data. Mathematical Scientist 1979/4, 55-61. * McMahon, April and McMahon, Robert (2005). Language Classification by Numbers. Oxford University Press. * Sankoff, David (1970). "On the Rate of Replacement of Word-Meaning Relationships." ''Language'' 46.564-569. * Wittmann, Henri (1969). "A lexico-statistic inquiry into the diachrony of Hittite." ''Indogermanische Forschungen'' 74.1-1

* Wittmann, Henri (1973). "The lexicostatistical classification of the French-based Creole languages." ''Lexicostatistics in genetic linguistics: Proceedings of the Yale conference, April 3–4, 1971'', dir. Isidore Dyen, 89-99. La Haye: Mouto


External links


The Global Lexicostatistical Database
part of the Evolution of Human Languages project
IE database


{{Long-range comparative linguistics Historical linguistics Comparative linguistics Quantitative linguistics