Related papers: Automated languages phylogeny from Levenshtein dis…
The evolution of languages closely resembles the evolution of haploid organisms. This similarity has been recently exploited \cite{GA,GJ} to construct language trees. The key point is the definition of a distance among all pairs of…
The idea of measuring distance between languages seems to have its roots in the work of the French explorer Dumont D'Urville (D'Urville 1832). He collected comparative words lists of various languages during his voyages aboard the Astrolabe…
Phylogenetic trees can be reconstructed from the matrix which contains the distances between all pairs of languages in a family. Recently, we proposed a new method which uses normalized Levenshtein distances among words with same meaning…
The idea that the distance among pairs of languages can be evaluated from lexical differences seems to have its roots in the work of the French explorer Dumont D'Urville. He collected comparative words lists of various languages during his…
The idea of measuring distance between languages seems to have its roots in the work of the French explorer Dumont D'Urville \cite{Urv}. He collected comparative words lists of various languages during his voyages aboard the Astrolabe from…
The Swadesh approach for determining the temporal separation between two languages relies on the stochastic process of words replacement (when a complete new word emerges to represent a given concept). It is well known that the basic…
This research project aimed to overcome the challenge of analysing human language relationships, facilitate the grouping of languages and formation of genealogical relationship between them by developing automated comparison techniques.…
Human history leaves fingerprints in human languages. Little is known over language evolution and its study is of great importance. Here, we construct a simple stochastic model and compare its results to statistical data of real languages.…
In this paper we examine the usefulness of two classes of algorithms Distance Methods, Discrete Character Methods (Felsenstein and Felsenstein 2003) widely used in genetics, for predicting the family relationships among a set of related…
Historical linguistics aims at inferring the most likely language phylogenetic tree starting from information concerning the evolutionary relatedness of languages. The available information are typically lists of homologous (lexical,…
Communication plays a vital role in human interaction. Studying language is a worthwhile task and more recently has become quantitative in nature with developments of fields like quantitative comparative linguistics and lexicostatistics.…
Languages are grouped into families that share common linguistic traits. While this approach has been successful in understanding genetic relations between diverse languages, more analyses are needed to accurately quantify their…
In a population with haploid reproduction any individual has a single parent in the previous generation. If all genealogical distances among pairs of individuals (generations from the closest common ancestor) are known it is possible to…
A method of languages genealogical trees construction is proposed.
Lexical resemblances among a group of languages indicate that the languages could be genetically related, i.e., they could have descended from a common ancestral language. However, such resemblances can arise by chance and, hence, need not…
Computational approaches in historical linguistics have been increasingly applied during the past decade and many new methods that implement parts of the traditional comparative method have been proposed. Despite these increased efforts,…
The study of spoken languages comprises phonology, morphology, and grammar. The languages can be classified as root languages, inflectional languages, and stem languages. In addition, languages continually change over time and space by…
In historical linguistics, the affiliation of languages to a common language family is traditionally carried out using a complex workflow that relies on manually comparing individual languages. Large-scale standardized collections of…
In traditional studies on language evolution, scholars often emphasize the importance of sound laws and sound correspondences for phylogenetic inference of language family trees. However, to date, computational approaches have typically not…
Human languages evolve continuously, and a puzzling problem is how to reconcile the apparent robustness of most of the deep linguistic structures we use with the evidence that they undergo possibly slow, yet ceaseless, changes. Is the state…