Year: 2008
Type: article
Abstract: The evolution of languages closely resembles the evolution of haploid organisms. This similarity has been recently exploited (Gray R. D. and Atkinson Q. D., Nature , 426 (2003) 435; Gray R. D. and Jordan F. M., Nature , 405 (2000) 1052) to construct language trees. The key point is the definition of a distance among all pairs of languages which is the analogous of a genetic distance. Many methods have been proposed to define these distances; one of these, used by glottochronology, computes the distance from the percentage of shared "cognates". Cognates are words inferred to have a common historical origin, and subjective judgment plays a relevant role in the identification process. Here we push closer the analogy with evolutionary biology and we introduce a genetic distance among language pairs by considering a renormalized Levenshtein distance among words with same meaning and averaging on all words contained in a Swadesh list (Swadesh M., Proc. Am. Philos. Soc. , 96 (1952) 452). The subjectivity of process is consistently reduced and the reproducibility is highly facilitated. We test our method against the Indo-European group considering fifty different languages and the two hundred words of the Swadesh list for any of them. We find out a tree which closely resembles the one published in Gray and Atkinson (2003), with some significant differences.
Source: Europhysics Letters (EPL)
Authors: M. Serva, F. Petroni
Institutions: University of L'Aquila, University of Liège
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2009506985