Evaluating linguistic distance measures

Wichmann, Søren; Holman, Eric W.; Bakker, Dik; Brown, Cecil H.

doi:10.1016/j.physa.2010.05.011

Cited by 108 publications

(77 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…The ASJP project with data [68] and methods [69] for the construction of phylogenies for nearly all of the world's language families now allows comparative phylogenetic modeling of cultural traditions around the world. It is an exciting time for comparative human studies as more and larger cultural databases become matched with linguistic (and genetic) phylogenies of deeper time depths.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Phylogenetics of the Tupi Language Family in Lowland South America

et al. 2012

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BackgroundRecent advances in automated assessment of basic vocabulary lists allow the construction of linguistic phylogenies useful for tracing dynamics of human population expansions, reconstructing ancestral cultures, and modeling transition rates of cultural traits over time.MethodsHere we investigate the Tupi expansion, a widely-dispersed language family in lowland South America, with a distance-based phylogeny based on 40-word vocabulary lists from 48 languages. We coded 11 cultural traits across the diverse Tupi family including traditional warfare patterns, post-marital residence, corporate structure, community size, paternity beliefs, sibling terminology, presence of canoes, tattooing, shamanism, men's houses, and lip plugs.Results/DiscussionThe linguistic phylogeny supports a Tupi homeland in west-central Brazil with subsequent major expansions across much of lowland South America. Consistently, ancestral reconstructions of cultural traits over the linguistic phylogeny suggest that social complexity has tended to decline through time, most notably in the independent emergence of several nomadic hunter-gatherer societies. Estimated rates of cultural change across the Tupi expansion are on the order of only a few changes per 10,000 years, in accord with previous cultural phylogenetic results in other language families around the world, and indicate a conservative nature to much of human culture.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Phylogenetics of the Tupi Language Family in Lowland South America

et al. 2012

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“…This measure performs very well when compared to expert opinions concerning the family a liation of languages (Wichmann et al, 2010). The idea behind this good performance of this rather simple measure of linguistic distance is the measurement of cognates between languages.…”

Section: Empirical Strategymentioning

confidence: 95%

Returns to Local and Foreign Language Skills - Causal Evidence from Spain

Isphording

2013

SSRN Journal

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“…We calculated the average, normalised distance between wordlists from a given pair of languages (the Levenshtein Distance Normalized & Divided, LDND, [36], see supporting information S6 Data for a list of word lists used). These wordlist are specifically constructed for inference about linguistic history, i.e., words that tend to be unstable in the transmission of languages through generations are excluded.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why are some languages confused for others? Investigating data from the Great Language Game

Skirgård

Roberts

Yencken³

2017

PLoS ONE

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In this paper we explore the results of a large-scale online game called ‘the Great Language Game’, in which people listen to an audio speech sample and make a forced-choice guess about the identity of the language from 2 or more alternatives. The data include 15 million guesses from 400 audio recordings of 78 languages. We investigate which languages are confused for which in the game, and if this correlates with the similarities that linguists identify between languages. This includes shared lexical items, similar sound inventories and established historical relationships. Our findings are, as expected, that players are more likely to confuse two languages that are objectively more similar. We also investigate factors that may affect players’ ability to accurately select the target language, such as how many people speak the language, how often the language is mentioned in written materials and the economic power of the target language community. We see that non-linguistic factors affect players’ ability to accurately identify the target. For example, languages with wider ‘global reach’ are more often identified correctly. This suggests that both linguistic and cultural knowledge influence the perception and recognition of languages and their similarity.

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Evaluating linguistic distance measures

Cited by 108 publications

References 12 publications

Cultural Phylogenetics of the Tupi Language Family in Lowland South America

Cultural Phylogenetics of the Tupi Language Family in Lowland South America

Returns to Local and Foreign Language Skills - Causal Evidence from Spain

Why are some languages confused for others? Investigating data from the Great Language Game

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