Investigating diachronic trends in phonological inventories using BDPROTO

Abstract

Here we present an expanded version of BDPROTO, a database comprising phonological inventory data from 257 ancient and reconstructed languages. These data were extracted from historical linguistic reconstructions and brought together into a single unified, normalized, accessible, and Unicode-compliant language resource. This dataset is publicly available and we aim to engage language scientists doing research on language change and language evolution. Furthermore, we identify a hitherto undiscussed temporal bias that complicates the simple comparison of ancient and reconstructed languages with present-day languages. Due to the sparsity of the data and the absence of statistical and computational methods that can adequately handle this bias, we instead directly target rates of change within and across families, thereby providing a case study to highlight BDPROTO's research viability; using phylogenetic comparative methods and high-resolution language family trees, we investigate whether consonantal and vocalic systems differ in their rates of change over the last 10,000 years. In light of the compilation of BDPROTO and the findings of our case study, we discuss the challenges involved in comparing the sound systems of reconstructed languages with modern day languages.

Biocultural diversity of common walnut (Juglans regia L.) and sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill.) across Eurasia

“…We are aware that our reconstruction of walnut and chestnut history will be affected by adjustments and revisions based on the availability of linguistic databases and theoretical developments in linguistics. As explained by Moran, Grossman, and Verkerk (2020), variability in phonological inventories, development of new phylogenetic tools, redefinition of cultural/linguistic lineages, and dating methods progressively increase the knowledge of the major processes underlying the evolution of human language. Despite these limitations, our findings highlight the importance and cogency ( i ) an efficient integration of the relevant cultural factors in the classical genome (G) × environmental (E) model, and ( ii ) a systematic application of the biocultural diversity concept in the reconstruction of evolutionary history of tree species.…”

The sounds of prehistoric speech

“…Some recent approaches rely less on synchronic patterns and emphasize the diachronic transitions within particular families, relying on the incorporation of statistical methods and the traditional comparative method [60]. Such approaches may benefit from new databases such as BDPROTO, a collection of reconstructed phoneme inventories from proto languages [19]. These sorts of data can help scholars to reconstruct the probabilities of certain phonological changes over time.…”

“…The reliance on shorter stems could generate pressures for larger phoneme inventories, in order to more effectively disambiguate words earlier during their production [16, p. 113; 18]. Recent work, based on a newly constructed database of reconstructed sound inventories for proto languages, does observe that some ancient inventories tend towards fewer consonants than their descendant languages [19]. Yet, it is unclear how robust this tendency is across the world's language families.…”

Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics

“…However, contrary to expectation, a recent study suggests that grammatical characters evolve faster than lexical data (Greenhill et al 2017). Differing rates of evolution are also found in phonology, specifically the rates of change in vowel inventories versus consonant inventories (Moran & Verkerk 2018;Moran et al 2020). An additional issue with grammatical characters is that the space of possibilities for a grammatical variable is Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics [3] often restricted.…”