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Die ersten Spaltungen des indogermanischen Urvolkes
... Schleicher argued that contemporary languages had also undergone a process of change, not too dissimilar from that which Darwin suggested for organisms: Evolutionary theory confirmed language descent, rather than suggesting it. Schleicher had already anticipated such a development, as is evident from his 1860 book and the earlier 1853 article (Schleicher 1853(Schleicher , 1860: "these assumptions [the origins of an Indo-European language family], deduced logically from the results of previous research, can best be depicted by the image of a branching tree" (Schleicher 1853: 787, translation from Koerner 1987. In Die Darwinische Theorie, Schleicher referred to the tree Darwin provided in the Origin, noting that it was a purely hypothetical construct, containing no real species, either at the tips or at the nodes. ...
... Schleicher argued that contemporary languages had also undergone a process of change, not too dissimilar from that which Darwin suggested for organisms: Evolutionary theory confirmed language descent, rather than suggesting it. Schleicher had already anticipated such a development, as is evident from his 1860 book and the earlier 1853 article (Schleicher 1853(Schleicher , 1860: "these assumptions [the origins of an Indo-European language family], deduced logically from the results of previous research, can best be depicted by the image of a branching tree" (Schleicher 1853: 787, translation from Koerner 1987. In Die Darwinische Theorie, Schleicher referred to the tree Darwin provided in the Origin, noting that it was a purely hypothetical construct, containing no real species, either at the tips or at the nodes. ...
... Schleicher's three trees have a modern language named at each tip with the branches and nodes labelled for their common origin (Figure 4.7). Thus, in both the 1853 and 1860 trees, there are branches for the Persian and Hindu languages, for example, linked by a node labelled Hindu-Persian (Schleicher 1853) or Asiatic (Hindu-Persian) (Schleicher 1860). Schleicher was convinced that the evolution of languages provided definitive evidence for the evolution of man and a way of tracing their development. ...
... Both biologists and linguists have a long tradition of using trees to model diversification by a genealogy. Trees were independently popularized by August Schleicher (1821-1868) in 1853 [4] and Charles Darwin (1809Darwin ( -1882 in 1859 [5]. Both fields also share a more recent tradition of using networks to capture reticulation, although early network models of languages [6][7][8][9] (see [10,11]) and life forms [12,13] (see [14]) even predate the classical family trees [4,5,[15][16][17] (see [10,14,18], and Fig. 1). ...
... Trees were independently popularized by August Schleicher (1821-1868) in 1853 [4] and Charles Darwin (1809Darwin ( -1882 in 1859 [5]. Both fields also share a more recent tradition of using networks to capture reticulation, although early network models of languages [6][7][8][9] (see [10,11]) and life forms [12,13] (see [14]) even predate the classical family trees [4,5,[15][16][17] (see [10,14,18], and Fig. 1). Some processual similarities are also reflected in the methods independently developed and applied in both disciplines, such as, for example, cladistic approaches and alignment analyses. ...
... At the same time, the identification of important processes, common to language and biological evolution, can give rise to new, potentially Schottel's branching table of Germanic languages from 1663 is the earliest we could identify. The three following early diagrams in linguistics by Stiernhielm (1671) [7], Hickes (1689), [9], and Gallet (1800) [8] all contain reticulation, real trees only start withĆelakovský and Schleicher (1853) [4,15]. The situation is similar in biology, where the two schemas by Leclerc De Buffon (1755) [12] and Rühling (1774) [13] allow for reticulation, in contrast to Lamarck (1809) [17] and Darwin (1837Darwin ( , 1859 [5,16] fruitful analogies. ...
Background
For a long time biologists and linguists have been noticing surprising similarities between the evolution of life forms and languages. Most of the proposed analogies have been rejected. Some, however, have persisted, and some even turned out to be fruitful, inspiring the transfer of methods and models between biology and linguistics up to today. Most proposed analogies were based on a comparison of the research objects rather than the processes that shaped their evolution. Focusing on process-based analogies, however, has the advantage of minimizing the risk of overstating similarities, while at the same time reflecting the common strategy to use processes to explain the evolution of complexity in both fields. ResultsWe compared important evolutionary processes in biology and linguistics and identified processes specific to only one of the two disciplines as well as processes which seem to be analogous, potentially reflecting core evolutionary processes. These new process-based analogies support novel methodological transfer, expanding the application range of biological methods to the field of historical linguistics. We illustrate this by showing (i) how methods dealing with incomplete lineage sorting offer an introgression-free framework to analyze highly mosaic word distributions across languages; (ii) how sequence similarity networks can be used to identify composite and borrowed words across different languages; (iii) how research on partial homology can inspire new methods and models in both fields; and (iv) how constructive neutral evolution provides an original framework for analyzing convergent evolution in languages resulting from common descent (Sapir’s drift). Conclusions
Apart from new analogies between evolutionary processes, we also identified processes which are specific to either biology or linguistics. This shows that general evolution cannot be studied from within one discipline alone. In order to get a full picture of evolution, biologists and linguists need to complement their studies, trying to identify cross-disciplinary and discipline-specific evolutionary processes. The fact that we found many process-based analogies favoring transfer from biology to linguistics further shows that certain biological methods and models have a broader scope than previously recognized. This opens fruitful paths for collaboration between the two disciplines. ReviewersThis article was reviewed by W. Ford Doolittle and Eugene V. Koonin.
... Schleicher argued that contemporary languages had also undergone a process of change, not too dissimilar from that which Darwin suggested for organisms: Evolutionary theory confirmed language descent, rather than suggesting it. Schleicher had already anticipated such a development, as is evident from his 1860 book and the earlier 1853 article (Schleicher 1853(Schleicher , 1860: "these assumptions [the origins of an Indo-European language family], deduced logically from the results of previous research, can best be depicted by the image of a branching tree" (Schleicher 1853: 787, translation from Koerner 1987. In Die Darwinische Theorie, Schleicher referred to the tree Darwin provided in the Origin, noting that it was a purely hypothetical construct, containing no real species, either at the tips or at the nodes. ...
... Schleicher argued that contemporary languages had also undergone a process of change, not too dissimilar from that which Darwin suggested for organisms: Evolutionary theory confirmed language descent, rather than suggesting it. Schleicher had already anticipated such a development, as is evident from his 1860 book and the earlier 1853 article (Schleicher 1853(Schleicher , 1860: "these assumptions [the origins of an Indo-European language family], deduced logically from the results of previous research, can best be depicted by the image of a branching tree" (Schleicher 1853: 787, translation from Koerner 1987. In Die Darwinische Theorie, Schleicher referred to the tree Darwin provided in the Origin, noting that it was a purely hypothetical construct, containing no real species, either at the tips or at the nodes. ...
... Schleicher's three trees have a modern language named at each tip with the branches and nodes labelled for their common origin (Figure 4.7). Thus, in both the 1853 and 1860 trees, there are branches for the Persian and Hindu languages, for example, linked by a node labelled Hindu-Persian (Schleicher 1853) or Asiatic (Hindu-Persian) (Schleicher 1860). Schleicher was convinced that the evolution of languages provided definitive evidence for the evolution of man and a way of tracing their development. ...
... Schleicher argued that contemporary languages had also undergone a process of change, not too dissimilar from that which Darwin suggested for organisms: Evolutionary theory confirmed language descent, rather than suggesting it. Schleicher had already anticipated such a development, as is evident from his 1860 book and the earlier 1853 article (Schleicher 1853(Schleicher , 1860: "these assumptions [the origins of an Indo-European language family], deduced logically from the results of previous research, can best be depicted by the image of a branching tree" (Schleicher 1853: 787, translation from Koerner 1987. In Die Darwinische Theorie, Schleicher referred to the tree Darwin provided in the Origin, noting that it was a purely hypothetical construct, containing no real species, either at the tips or at the nodes. ...
... Schleicher argued that contemporary languages had also undergone a process of change, not too dissimilar from that which Darwin suggested for organisms: Evolutionary theory confirmed language descent, rather than suggesting it. Schleicher had already anticipated such a development, as is evident from his 1860 book and the earlier 1853 article (Schleicher 1853(Schleicher , 1860: "these assumptions [the origins of an Indo-European language family], deduced logically from the results of previous research, can best be depicted by the image of a branching tree" (Schleicher 1853: 787, translation from Koerner 1987. In Die Darwinische Theorie, Schleicher referred to the tree Darwin provided in the Origin, noting that it was a purely hypothetical construct, containing no real species, either at the tips or at the nodes. ...
... Schleicher's three trees have a modern language named at each tip with the branches and nodes labelled for their common origin (Figure 4.7). Thus, in both the 1853 and 1860 trees, there are branches for the Persian and Hindu languages, for example, linked by a node labelled Hindu-Persian (Schleicher 1853) or Asiatic (Hindu-Persian) (Schleicher 1860). Schleicher was convinced that the evolution of languages provided definitive evidence for the evolution of man and a way of tracing their development. ...
... similarities in form between words may point to a common origin) and had realized that diversity could be explained via descent with modification (e.g. Schleicher 1853). Inspired by Darwin's publications, they quickly moved to making trees representing linguistic descent. ...
... The first published manuscript depicting a phylogeny was published by Carl Johan Schlyter in 1827 (Collin & Schlyter 1827). Schleicher had also used language trees with branches six years before the publication of Darwin's book (Schleicher 1853). ...
... The most common approach to represent genealogical relationships between species or languages is a tree of descent. The tree model was popularised in linguistics by Schleicher in 1853 (Schleicher 1853;List et al. 2016;Jacques and List 2019). Recently, it has experienced a new increase in popularity in historical linguistics, especially in combination with Bayesian statistics (Gray et al. 2009;Grollemund et al. 2015;Kolipakam et al. 2018;Koile et al. 2022). ...
The so-called 'Altaic' languages have been subject of debate for over 200 years. An array of different data sets have been used to investigate the genealogical relationships between them, but the controversy persists. The new data with a high potential for such cases in historical linguistics are structural features, which are sometimes declared to be prone to borrowing and discarded from the very beginning and at other times considered to have an especially precise historical signal reaching further back in time than other types of linguistic data. We investigate the performance of typological features across different domains of language by using an admixture model from genetics. As implemented in the software STRUCTURE, this model allows us to account for both a genealogical and an areal signal in the data. Our analysis shows that morphological features have the strongest genea-logical signal and syntactic features diffuse most easily. When using only morphological structural data, the model is able to correctly identify three language families: Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic, whereas Japonic and Koreanic languages are assigned the same ancestry.
... This changed in the mid of the 19th century, when scholars started to take the idea that languages seem to evolve in tree-like patterns more seriously. While this idea had been around for some time before the advent of "modern" historical linguistics , it was not until scholars like August Schleicher (1821Schleicher ( -1868 started to propagate the idea not only in words, but also in illustrations (Schleicher 1853, Schleicher 1861, that the family tree model of language history was accepted as something useful to discuss in historical linguistics. ...
While the discipline of computational linguistics mostly deals with the modeling and the investigation of individual languages (often "big" languages such as English, German, Arabic, or Chinese), Multilingual Computational Linguistics focuses on the comparison of languages, trying to develop new methods and techniques by which languages can be compared automatically or in a computer-assisted manner. The comparison itself follows different perspectives (maintaining a historical, typological, or areal viewpoint). In this scientific practice course, we will take a closer look at basic theories and methods which are relevant for the discipline of Multilingual Computational Linguistics. We will look at large corpora with multiple languages of the world as well as data from individual languages and language families.
... The comparative method, informed by the notion that sound change proceeds in a regular and systematic fashion (in line with the so-called "Neogrammarian hypothesis"; see sec tion 3.1 later), serves as the basis for constructing genetic trees, a practice dating back to Schleicher (1853). Subgroups in a tree are generally defined on the basis of shared genet ic innovations (synapomorphies) (Hoenigswald, 1966;Leskien, 1876). ...
The chapter looks at language variation and change, and the relation of these processes to language reconstruction and classification. The chapter gives an overview of theories, models, methods, and data, describing how diversity and variation is modelled and measured for reconstruction and classification within traditional, comparative and statistical, evolutionary, or phylogenetic methods. First, the chapter identifies the basic principles of language change and the way in which these differ within various subdomains of language. A second part delves into the outcomes of change, describing the diverse results of sound change, lexical change, and typological/morphosyntactic change. Here, important aspects include the inherent propensity of change, the role of arbitrariness, the role of systems, horizontal transfer, and the outcome of change at macro-levels. Finally, the chapter deals with the issue of the ontological status of the reconstruction, and how various theoretical approaches may affect the interpretation of results. The chapter reviews results and controversies arising from current research.
... As a universal language, signed language was not thought to have a historical dimension in the same way that spoken languages were thought to have. Around the mid-nineteenth century, August Schleicher and others had begun to trace the ramification of eight spoken language families from Indo-European (e.g., Schleicher, 1853). In roughly the same period, Thomas H. Gallaudet (1847, p. 56) theorized that the "natural language of signs" had its origins in deaf children's "natural, spontaneous facility." ...
In contrast to scholars and signers in the nineteenth century, William Stokoe conceived of American Sign Language (ASL) as a unique linguistic tradition with roots in nineteenth-century langue des signes française, a conception that is apparent in his earliest scholarship on ASL. Stokoe thus contributed to the theoretical foundations upon which the field of sign language historical linguistics would later develop. This review focuses on the development of sign language historical linguistics since Stokoe, including the field's significant progress and the theoretical and methodological problems that it still faces. The review examines the field's development through the lens of two related problems pertaining to how we understand sign language relationships and to our understanding of cognacy, as the term pertains to signs. It is suggested that the theoretical notions underlying these terms do not straightforwardly map onto the historical development of many sign languages. Recent approaches in sign language historical linguistics are highlighted and future directions for research are suggested to address the problems discussed in this review.
... Чешский поэт и филолог Франтишек Челаковский создал изображение языкового древа для языков славянской группы [Čelakovský, 1853, p. 3]. Вероятно, этот рисунок мог послужить основой для первого изображения лингвистического древа, включающего все индоевропейские языки [Schleicher, 1853]. С этого момента сам Август Шлейхер, а затем его коллеги и последователи стали использовать модель дерева для визуализации эволюции языков. ...
... Using trees to model genealogical relationships between different languages has historically been a common approach in linguistics (Schleicher and Schleicher, 1853). Although this is not the only model, and there exist alternatives such as wave model (Schmidt, 1872), tree structure naturally suits for depicting origination of languages one from another over time. ...
The choice of parameter sharing strategy in multilingual machine translation models determines how optimally parameter space is used and hence, directly influences ultimate translation quality. Inspired by linguistic trees that show the degree of relatedness between different languages, the new general approach to parameter sharing in multilingual machine translation was suggested recently. The main idea is to use these expert language hierarchies as a basis for multilingual architecture: the closer two languages are, the more parameters they share. In this work, we test this idea using the Transformer architecture and show that despite the success in previous work there are problems inherent to training such hierarchical models. We demonstrate that in case of carefully chosen training strategy the hierarchical architecture can outperform bilingual models and multilingual models with full parameter sharing.
... [15]) or languages (e.g. [16][17][18][19][20]) or any other kind of classified objects. The languages of the selected publications were English, French, German and Latin. ...
This paper compares and categorizes historical ideas about trees showing relationships among biological entities. The hierarchical structure of a tree is used to test the global consistency of similarities among these ideas; in other words we assess the “treeness” of the tree of historical trees. The collected data are figures and ideas about trees showing relationships among biological entities published or drawn by naturalists from 1555 to 2012. They are coded into a matrix of 235 historical trees and 141 descriptive attributes. From the most parsimonious “tree” of historical trees, treeness is measured by consistency index, retention index and homoplasy excess ratio. This tree is used to create sets or categories of trees, or to study the circulation of ideas. From an unrooted network of historical trees, treeness is measured by the delta-score. This unrooted network is used to measure and visualize treeness. The two approaches show a rather good treeness of the data, with respectively a retention idex of 0.83 and homoplasy excess ratio of 0.74, on one hand, and a delta-score of 0.26 on the other hand. It is interpreted as due to vertical transmission, i.e. an inheritance of shared ideas about biological trees among authors. This tree of trees is then used to test categories previously made. For instance, cladists and gradists are « paraphyletic ». The branches of this tree of trees suggest new categories of tree-thinkers that could have been overlooked by historians or systematists.
... Although he was not the first to draw language trees, 1 it was August Schleicher (1821-1866) who popularized tree thinking in linguistics. In two early papers from 1853 (Schleicher 1853a(Schleicher , 1853b and numerous studies published thereafter (e.g. Schleicher 1861, 1863), Schleicher propagated the idea that the assumptions about language history could be best "illustrated by the image of a branching tree" (Schleicher 1853a: 787). 2 It should be noted that there was no notable influence from Darwin's writings in his work. ...
There are important reasons to be sceptical of the accuracy and usefulness of the family-tree model in historical linguistics. That model assumes that every linguistic innovation applies to a language considered as an undifferentiated whole, a point with no “width”. But this assumption makes it impossible to use a tree to model the partial diffusion of an innovation within a language community (“internal diffusion”), or the diffusion of an innovation across language communities (“external diffusion”). These limitations have long been noticed by historical linguists (Schmidt 1872, Schuchardt 1900); but they become glaringly obvious in the cases discussed by Ross (1988) and François (2014) under the heading of “linkages” – i.e., language families that arise through the diversification, in situ, of a dialect network. The articles in this special issue all contribute towards addressing this problem, from a range of perspectives. ______________ Siva Kalyan, Alexandre François & Harald Hammarström (eds), 2019. "Understanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model". Special issue of "Journal of Historical Linguistics" 9/1.
... This is opposed to the phenotypic gradualism (see Appendix A) with intermediate evolutionary stages (the missing link) proposed by Darwin (1859). Darwin used to support his theory the analogy between linguistic families that came from a common ancestor and species, as well as the historical linguistics of Schleicher (1853) (see Appendix B). This evolutionary alternative is also very similar to what is usually found in different languages, whose changes are not gradual. ...
In this second part, we will highlight the relationship between the theory of the evolution of species and linguistics. The preceding will serve as antecedents to develop a Genetic Typology, following the guidelines established by non-orthodox evolutionary theory that makes explicit the "genetic composition" of all languages. To achieve these objectives, we will invoke the Theory of Hidden Colors, by analogy. A tool used in biology to explain, through the study of mutations (in plants and animals), the genetic mechanism that determines the development of an embryo or a new plant. In this part of the work, we propose to demonstrate that the origin of a new language can be explained similarly as today, it is known that a new species emerges. The research carried out suggests that
Protolanguages (the precursors of natural human language) are genetic (social) strategies for communicating the reality apprehended, and therefore, it is not relative because it reflects the vision we have of this reality. The Urlingua (the universal language), on the other hand, is relative because it determines how we interpret the world and our reality in it.
... The evolutionary relationships of languages have been a lively field of research for nearly two centuries, ever since Schleicher's evolutionary trees (Schleicher 1853) and Dumont d'Urville's attempt to introduce a quantitative aspect into the comparison of Oceanic languages (see Hymes (1983) on d'Urville's work in 1834). These early roots predate Darwin's first sketch of an evolutionary tree of species, possibly drawn in 1837. ...
The increasing availability of large digital corpora of cross-linguistic data is revolutionizing many branches of linguistics. Overall, it has triggered a shift of attention from detailed questions about individual features to more global patterns amenable to rigorous, but statistical, analyses. This engenders an approach based on successive approximations where models with simplified assumptions result in frameworks that can then be systematically refined, always keeping explicit the methodological commitments and the assumed prior knowledge. Therefore, they can resolve disputes between competing frameworks quantitatively by separating the support provided by the data from the underlying assumptions. These methods, though, often appear as a ‘black box’ to traditional practitioners. In fact, the switch to a statistical view complicates comparison of the results from these newer methods with traditional understanding, sometimes leading to misinterpretation and overly broad claims. We describe here this evolving methodological shift, attributed to the advent of big, but often incomplete and poorly curated data, emphasizing the underlying similarity of the newer quantitative to the traditional comparative methods and discussing when and to what extent the former have advantages over the latter. In this review, we cover briefly both randomization tests for detecting patterns in a largely model-independent fashion and phylolinguistic methods for a more model-based analysis of these patterns. We foresee a fruitful division of labor between the ability to computationally process large volumes of data and the trained linguistic insight identifying worthy prior commitments and interesting hypotheses in need of comparison.
... We used delta scores to measure the complexity of Neighbour-Net. Due to such horizontal influences, the evolution of Chinese dialects does not conform to the family-tree theory 13 , but instead conforms to the wave theory 14 . The family-tree theory concerns language evolution induced by social splitting and language divergence, whereas the wave theory emphasizes the importance of horizontal influences in the process of language contact. ...
Han Chinese experienced substantial population migrations and admixture in history, yet little is known about the evolutionary process of Chinese dialects. Here, we used phylogenetic approaches and admixture inference to explicitly decompose the underlying structure of the diversity of Chinese dialects, based on the total phoneme inventories of 140 dialect samples from seven traditional dialect groups: Mandarin, Wu, Xiang, Gan, Hakka, Min and Yue. We found a north-south gradient of phonemic differences in Chinese dialects induced from historical population migrations. We also quantified extensive horizontal language transfers among these dialects, corresponding to the complicated socio-genetic history in China. We finally identified that the middle latitude dialects of Xiang, Gan and Hakka were formed by admixture with other four dialects. Accordingly, the middle-latitude areas in China were a linguistic melting pot of northern and southern Han populations. Our study provides a detailed phylogenetic and historical context against family-tree model in China.
... Linguists have long been aware of the problems that borrowing introduces. At about the same time that Darwin suggested the tree metaphor for the evolution of species in 1859 [1], August Schleicher introduced the family tree to linguistics [17]. Few years later, his model was rejected by several scholars arguing against the use of a simple tree model to describe the evolution of languages, which they noted to be reticulated by nature [18,19]. ...
Zenbait hamarkada joan zaizkigu Mitxelenak (1981) Euskara Batu Zaharra (EBZ), euskararen dialektoak sortzen hasi aurreko azken hizkuntz egoera bateratua, proposatu zuenetik. Aldiz, euskal dialektologia (diakronikoa) ez da horrenbeste garatu 40 urteotan eta gaia oraindik guztiz zabalik dago. Hala ere, egin dira zenbait hipotesi EBZren hausturaren inguruan. Lan honetan, EBZren lehen haustura ikertzeko kontuan hartu beharreko alderdi metodologikoak aztertzen ditut lehenik, inguruko tradizio garatuenetatik harturik. Ondoren, EBZren lehen hausturaz mintzatu diren lanak berrikusi eta ebaluatzen ditut, dialektologia diakronikoa egiteko oinarri metodologikoak betetzen dituzten ikusteko. Ikusten denez, oso gutxi dira filogenia egiten saiatzen diren lanak, eta are gutxiago irizpide kronologikoa, geografikoa eta hizkuntzazkoa gainditzen dituzten berrikuntzekin aritu direnak.
Cultural phylogenetics has made remarkable progress by relying on methods originally developed in biology. But biological and cultural evolution do not always proceed according to the same principles. So what, if anything, could justify the use of phylogenetic methods to reconstruct the evolutionary history of culture? In this paper, we describe models used to assess the reliability of inference methods and show how these models play an underappreciated role in addressing that question. The notion of reliability is of course central to these models. As we explain, a common way of understanding reliability is in terms of low error rates. A careful look at case studies in cultural phylogenetics suggests that reliability models partly corroborate this understanding of reliability but also raises points of tension. We conclude by hinting at a few ways forward.
Az Oktatási Hivatal gondozásában jelent meg 2020-ban az új Nemzeti Alaptanterv szellemében íródotttörténelem tankönyv az általános iskolák 5. osztálya számára. A tankönyv 14. fejezete („Történetek amagyarok eredetéről”) váltotta a ki a legtöbb –gyakran érzelmektől sem mentes – közéleti vitát. Utóbbiérzelmi vitákba nemszeretnék bekapcsolódni,viszont az említett lecke „A mondai hagyomány és a
nyelvi hasonlóságok – ellentét vagy nem ellentét?”című alfejezetében a tananyag írója olyan, elsősorban uralisztikát, másodsorban ősrégészetet érintő kijelentéseket fogalmaz meg, amelyekhez érdemes szakmai megjegyzéseket fűzni a finnugor „ősnép”,„ősnyelv” és „őshaza” kapcsán.
The aim of this chapter is to trace the development of contact-induced language change as a subfield of linguistic research in China. We first provide a brief introduction to the history of the field and present relevant research from recent decades. Drawing on data from existing language contact situations, we discuss data on change among languages of southern China. Findings and analytical approaches will contribute to future research on the contact-induced changes occurring between Chinese and the minority languages of southern/southwestern China.
Modern languages like English, Spanish, Russian and Hindi as well as ancient languages like Greek, Latin and Sanskrit all belong to the Indo-European language family, which means that they all descend from a common ancestor. But how, more precisely, are the Indo-European languages related to each other? This book brings together pioneering research from a team of international scholars to address this fundamental question. It provides an introduction to linguistic subgrouping as well as offering comprehensive, systematic and up-to-date analyses of the ten main branches of the Indo-European language family: Anatolian, Tocharian, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic. By highlighting that these branches are saliently different from each other, yet at the same time display striking similarities, the book demonstrates the early diversification of the Indo-European language family, spoken today by half the world's population. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
The chapter provides a general introduction to the book, presenting the background and the overall framework. It assesses the relationship between traditional linguistic phylogenetics and more recent computational approaches. After discussing the terminology relevant for linguistic phylogenetic studies it provides an overview of the various chapters of the book, highlighting some of the most important problems discussed by the authors. It then discusses some of the specific results of the individual chapters and the broader perspectives they offer on the phylogenetics of the Indo-European language family.
This article deals with the powerful role of metaphors in the process of Language Making throughout the history of linguistics. It departs from the assumption that metaphors play an essential role both in the formation of scientific theories and in common conceptions of language. We want to illuminate to what extent metaphors are involved in language ideologies, and we investigate their role in linguistic theory formation. After introducing different approaches to metaphor theory, we show how metaphorization in linguistics can lead to biological , territorial and liquid concepts of language. Finally, we discuss the need for a re-evaluation of language concepts within the discipline.
This paper updates the reconstruction of the stative aspect prefix in Proto-Zapotecan as *n- and tracks innovations in stative marking. An early change is proposed to have deleted preconsonantal nasals, rendering segmentally unmarked stative forms of consonant-initial verbs in varieties of Zapotec then spoken in and around the city of Monte Albán. Contact with Chatino may be a factor in the retention of preconsonantal *n in Zapotec varieties spoken to the south. A fuller stative prefix, usually *na-, arose later from a grammaticalized form of the stative-marked copula ( Munro 2007 ; Uchihara 2021 ). *na- is more productive than * n- and provides the basis for a new proposed “Eastern Zapotec” genetic grouping. However, the isogloss for *na- crosscuts the earlier isogloss for preconsonantal nasal deletion, showing that any model of Zapotecan linguistic history needs to address not only divergence but also convergence. Ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence provide a social context to the linguistic changes discussed.
The main goal of this paper is to establish an ordered timeline of the phonetic shifts that oral Latin experienced since the split of Sardinian up to the disintegration of the western family; at the same time, some methodological problems about the graphic representation of the relations among languages are discussed. Consequently, we propose a division of the branches of the Romance family and outline the phonological systems that characterized each group.
What isamorphological feature? I shall provide two formal answers, an algebraic and a geometric one. The algebraic answer differentiates between dependencies among carriers and properties and can thus identify feature complexes. A character is thenamember of such a complex, in which the possibilities of discrimination of the complex are realized. This allows us, for instance, to analyze the cladistic phylogenetics, i. e. the logical formalization of the Darwinian family trees. The geometric response also captures the constraints of trait combinations. The valid combinations are subject to structural, functional, developmental or environmental constraints. Thus, it incorporates Cuvier’s ideas about the functional coordination of the parts as well as those of Geoffroy about structural correspondences and also the holistic ones of Goethe about organisms in the context of life. Also, the conceptions of intellectuals of the Baroque age, like Kircher or Leibniz, about the connections between characters and forms of life find their natural place. Our geometric formalism can also describe possibilities for the emergence of evolutionary innovations, in a structural conception going beyond the neo-Darwinian synthesis.
This paper investigates the impact of genealogical language distance in cross-border communication on private participation infrastructure projects. Our analysis of 5440 projects in 64 countries (1990–2004) shows that the probability of success of private participation projects is lower in countries characterized by a larger genealogical language distance. We also find that this effect is weaker when the project involves a local investor or the host country government. In contrast, the same effect is strengthened when the project is greenfield. Finally, including the host country government as an investor in the project has no moderating effect in the effect of genealogical language distance on private participation projects.
Skepticism regarding the tree model has a long tradition in historical linguistics. Although scholars have emphasized that the tree model and its long-standing counterpart, the wave theory, are not necessarily incompatible, the opinion that family trees are unrealistic and should be completely abandoned in the field of historical linguistics has always enjoyed a certain popularity. This skepticism has further increased with the advent of recently proposed techniques for data visualization which seem to confirm that we can study language history without trees. In this article, we show that the concrete arguments that have been brought up in favor of achronistic wave models do not hold. By comparing the phenomenon of incomplete lineage sorting in biology with processes in linguistics, we show that data which do not seem as though they can be explained using trees can indeed be explained without turning to diffusion as an explanation. At the same time, methodological limits in historical reconstruction might easily lead to an overestimation of regularity, which may in turn appear as conflicting patterns when the researcher is trying to reconstruct a coherent phylogeny. We illustrate how, in several instances, trees can benefit language comparison, although we also discuss their shortcomings in modeling mixed languages. While acknowledging that not all aspects of language history are tree-like, and that integrated models which capture both vertical and lateral language relations may depict language history more realistically than trees do, we conclude that all models claiming that vertical language relations can be completely ignored are essentially wrong: either they still tacitly draw upon family trees or they only provide a static display of data and thus fail to model temporal aspects of language history.
Siva Kalyan, Alexandre François & Harald Hammarström. 2019. Problems with, and alternatives to, the tree model in historical linguistics. In Siva Kalyan, Alexandre François & Harald Hammarström (eds), Understanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model. Special issue of Journal of Historical Linguistics 9/1: 1–8.
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There are important reasons to be sceptical of the accuracy and usefulness of the family-tree model in historical linguistics. That model assumes that every linguistic innovation applies to a language considered as an undifferentiated whole, a point with no “width”. But this assumption makes it impossible to use a tree to model the partial diffusion of an innovation within a language community (“internal diffusion”), or the diffusion of an innovation across language communities (“external diffusion”). These limitations have long been noticed by historical linguists (Schmidt 1872, Schuchardt 1900); but they become glaringly obvious in the cases discussed by Ross (1988) and François (2014) under the heading of “linkages” – i.e., language families that arise through the diversification, in situ, of a dialect network. The articles in this special issue all contribute towards addressing this problem, from a range of perspectives.
Historical Glottometry is a method, recently proposed by Kalyan and François ( François 2014 ; Kalyan & François 2018 ), for analyzing and representing the relationships among sister languages in a language family. We present a glottometric analysis of the Sogeram language family of Papua New Guinea and, in the process, provide an evaluation of the method. We focus on three topics that we regard as problematic: how to handle the higher incidence of cross-cutting isoglosses in the Sogeram data; how best to handle lexical innovations; and what to do when the data do not allow the analyst to be sure whether a given language underwent a given innovation or not. For each topic we compare different ways of coding and calculating the data and suggest the best way forward. We conclude by proposing changes to the way glottometric data are coded and calculated and the way glottometric results are visualized. We also discuss how to incorporate Historical Glottometry into an effective historical-linguistic research workflow.
There have been a number of important efforts to map out the languages of Iran, but until now no language atlas, or even a comprehensive and detailed country-level language map, has been produced. One of the recent initiatives which aims to fill this gap is the online Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) (http://iranatlas.net). This article delineates objectives of the ALI research programme, atlas architecture, research methodology, and preliminary results that have been generated. Specific topics of interest are the structure and content of the linguistic data questionnaire; the handling of contrasting perspectives about the status of “languages” and “dialects” through a flexible multi-dimensional classification web; and the role of ongoing comparisons between language distribution assessments and hard linguistic data.
The Karaite language has justifiedly attracted the attention of Turkologists though it should also be of interest to students of Jewish languages (= the languages of Rabbanite and Karaite Jews); and what students of Jewish languages have to say about it should interest Turkologists, just as what the latter have to say should interest the former. By looking at Karaite (as exemplified in Michał Németh’s Unknown Lutsk Karaim Letters in Hebrew Script (19th–20th Centuries): A Critical Edition)from the viewpoint of other Jewish languages, researchers can: Add new questions to the agenda of Karaite research. For example, the existence of an idiosyncratic type of periphrastic verb in at least Karaite, Judezmo, Yidish, and Ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazic English prompts the question of what the genetic relationships between the tokens of that type are. Reopens old questions. For example, the derivation proposed for Karaite כניסא '[Karaite (and/or Rabbanite?)] synagog', with phonological variants, according to which the word comes from Arabic. The author proposes a different etymology (possibly not original with him) , involving only Jewish languages (a more appropriate derivation for a Karaite word having that meaning), which takes the Karaite word back to Hebrew and/or to Jewish Aramaic.
Linguistic diffusion is commonly equated with contact, and contrasted with genealogy. This article takes a new perspective, by showing how diffusion lies in fact at the heart of language genealogy itself. Indeed, the Comparative method has taught us to identify genetic subgroups based on sets of shared innovations; but each of these innovations necessarily had to diffuse from speaker to speaker across a network of then mutually intelligible idiolects. Such a diffusionist approach to language genealogy allows us to model language change as it really took place in the social and geographical space of past societies. Crucially, the entangled isoglosses typical of dialect continuums and linkages (Ross 1988) cannot be handled by the Tree model, which is solely based on divergence; but they are easily captured by a diffusionist approach such as the Wave model, where the key process is convergence. After comparing the theoretical underpinnings of these two models, I introduce Historical Glottometry, a new quantitative approach aiming to free the Comparative Method from any cladistic assumption, and to reconcile it with a wave-based analysis. Finally, data from a group of Oceanic languages from Vanuatu illustrate the powerful potential of Glottometry as a new method for linguistic subgrouping.
[The abstract is in English, the paper in French]
Among the scholars who tackled the topic of language origins in the 19th century, the German philosopher Ludwig Noiré (1829–1889) deserves special mention. To him, the unique sociability of humans implies cooperation and cooperation in turn involves language. Remarkably, Noiré’s theory deeply influenced the debate on language origins until the 1950s. Before offering some theoretical and historical explanations for the enduring influence of Noiré’s theory, it is necessary to describe the general features of his theory and the context in which it arose. After dealing with the German-English debate on language origins during the 19th century, a section will be especially devoted to Noiré’s theory of language origins. Finally, a comparison between Noiré’s insight and the naturalistic framework of the 19th century is suggested.
How do we know where languages begin and where they end? It is widely assumed that languages exist as discrete, distinct entities, an idea that forms the basis of mono- and multilingualism, as well as of source and target languages in translation theory. What created that clear-cut division between languages? I argue that our current conception of language was invented as part of the process of the creation of the nation-state. The idea of a language, and therefore of translation, was a product of nation-state formation that required the construction of boundaries to divide homogeneous territories, peoples, and their languages. The Stammbaum model of linguistic filiation emerged as part of the same politicized ideology of modernity. Against this, I consider the alternative model of language mixture, which conceptualizes language as a transformative process of interaction without boundaries and challenges ideas of a language and of translation.
Die Wirkung der Evolutionstheorie auf die wissenschaftliche Betrachtung der biologischen und kulturellen Geschichte der Menschheit und ihrer Varietäten muss vor dem Hintergrund vorevolutionärer Konzepte betrachtet werden. Dabei sind insbesondere die Gegentheorien des Monogenismus und Polygenismus sowie das Bild der Kette der Lebewesen relevant. Sie reichen in der Geschichte weit zurück. Die Genealogie der Menschheit wurde im Mittelalter gemäß der Genesis von den Söhnen Noahs abgeleitet. Im Zuge der frühneuzeitlichen Begegnungen mit dem nicht-christlichen Westafrika und den Heiden der Neuen Welt wurden die Stämme Japhets, Shems und Hams konsequent mit den Bewohnern der Erdteile Europa, Asien und Afrika identifiziert. Die »Entdeckung« der Amerinder fügte eine weitere Menschenvarietät hinzu. Sie führte zu einer polygenetischen Theorie, die der dominanten Annahme einer einheitlichen Schöpfung des Menschen widersprach. Isaac La Peyrère wagte nämlich die Hypothese, dass es sich bei den Amerindern um die Abkömmlinge einer ersten Schöpfung Gottes handle — um Präadamiten (Praeadamitae, 1655).
Languages and genes are both transmitted from generation to generation, with opportunity for differential reproduction and survivorship of forms. Here we apply a rigorous inference framework, drawn from population genetics, to distinguish between two broad mechanisms of language change: drift and selection. Drift is change that results from stochasticity in transmission and it may occur in the absence of any intrinsic difference between linguistic forms; whereas selection is truly an evolutionary force arising from intrinsic differences -- for example, when one form is preferred by members of the population. Using large corpora of parsed texts spanning the 12th century to the 21st century, we analyze three examples of grammatical changes in English: the regularization of past-tense verbs, the rise of the periphrastic `do', and syntactic variation in verbal negation. We show that we can reject stochastic drift in favor of a selective force driving some of these language changes, but not others. The strength of drift depends on a word's frequency, and so drift provides an alternative explanation for why some words are more prone to change than others. Our results suggest an important role for stochasticity in language change, and they provide a null model against which selective theories of language evolution must be compared.
The idea that language history is best visualized by a branching tree has been controversially discussed in the linguistic world and many alternative theories have been proposed. The reluctance of many scholars to accept the tree as the natural metaphor for language history was due to conflicting signals in linguistic data: many resemblances would simply not point to a unique tree. Despite these observations, the majority of automatic approaches applied to language data has been based on the tree model, while network approaches have rarely been applied. Due to the specific sociolinguistic situation in China, where very divergent varieties have been developing under the roof of a common culture and writing system, the history of the Chinese dialects is complex and intertwined. They are therefore a good test case for methods which no longer take the family tree as their primary model. Here we use a network approach to study the lexical history of 40 Chinese dialects. In contrast to previous approaches, our method is character-based and captures both vertical and horizontal aspects of language history. According to our results, the majority of characters in our data (about 54%) cannotbe readily explained with the help of a given tree model. The borrowing events inferred by our method do not only reflect general uncertainties of Chinese dialect classification, they also reveal the strong influence of the standard language on Chinese dialect history. © 2014 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. All rights reserved.
„Schöpfung“ bezeichnet sowohl einen Vorgang als auch sein Ergebnis und ordnet beides einem Schöpfer zu. Aussagen der Naturwissenschaftler über die Schöfung sind nicht immer verträglich verträglich mit entsprechenden Aussagen der Theologen, Metaphysiker und Philosophen. Das kann zu heftigen Auseinandersetzungen führen, wenn es um die Formulierung der Aufgaben oder Pflichten des ethisch handelnden Menschen in der Schöpfung geht. Die Ursache liegt im Unterschied zwischen der biologischen und der philosophisch-theologischen Interpretation der Schöpfung. Speziell Theologen predigen zwar den Schöpfer, aber verstehen organische und kulturelle Evolution nicht, die den Mechanismus der belebten Schöpfung bilden. Evolution bezeichnet einen Fluss von verschlüsselter Information, die vom Lebewesen vervielfältigt und an andere Lebewesen weitergegeben wird, als organische oder kulturelle Information. Beide beeinflussen einander, aber weder kann kulturell tradierte Information ins genetische Erbgut gelangen noch ist kulturelle Evolution einfach Fortsetzung der genetischen Evolution.
August Schleicher ist ein von der Historiographie nach wie vor häufig beforschter Linguist. Er ist unzweifelhaft der bekannteste Sprachforscher, was die Verbindung von Sprach- und Naturwissenschaft anbelangt. Die Gründe, weshalb Schleicher für lange Zeit (und zum Teil noch immer) fälschlicherweise als Darwinist gesehen wird, sind mannigfaltig. In der vorliegenden Arbeit zeigt sich, dass die Vermengung von Darwin und Schleicher aufgrund mangelnden wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Wissens zustande kam. Zudem scheint eine gründliche Lektüre von Schleichers Werken unterblieben zu sein. Im Glauben, durch Lesen von Schleichers ?Die Darwinsche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft. Offenes Sendschreiben an Herren Dr. Ernst Haeckel? (1863) dessen gesamte Theorie (bzw. die charakteristischsten Elemente derselben) erfasst zu haben, wurde ein rudimentäres und verzerrtes Bild von Schleichers Sprachauffassung gezeichnet. Dadurch wurde auch der Blick für die eigentlichen Einflüsse verstellt: einerseits Schleichers prä-darwinistisches evolutionistisches Denken und andererseits der starke Einfluss Hegel?scher Philosophie. Beide zusammen bilden die Grundpfeiler für die Sprachtheorie Schleichers.
Contrary to widespread belief, there is no reason to think that language diversification typically follows a tree-like pattern, consisting of a nested series of neat splits. Except for the odd case of language isolation or swift migration and dispersal, the normal situation is for language change to involve multiple events of diffusion across mutually intelligible idiolects in a network, typically distributed into conflicting isoglosses. Insofar as these events of language-internal diffusion are later reflected in descendant languages, the sort of language family they define - a "linkage" (Ross 1988) - is one in which genealogical relations cannot be represented by a tree, but only by a diagram in which subgroups intersect. Non-cladistic models are needed to represent language genealogy, in ways that take into account the common case of linkages and intersecting subgroups. This paper will focus on an approach that combines the precision of the Comparative Method with the realism of the Wave Model. This method, labeled Historical Glottometry, identifies genealogical subgroups in a linkage situation, and assesses their relative strengths based on the distribution of innovations among modern languages. Provided it is applied with the rigour inherent to the Comparative Method, Historical Glottometry should help unravel the genealogical structures of the world's language families, by acknowledging the role played by linguistic convergence and diffusion in the historical processes of language diversification.
Pedigrees illustrate the genealogical relationships among individuals, and phylogenies do the same for groups of organisms (such as species, genera, etc.). Here, I provide a brief survey of current concepts and methods for calculating and displaying genealogical relationships. These relationships have long been recognized to be reticulating, rather than strictly divergent, and so both pedigrees and phylogenies are correctly treated as networks rather than trees. However, currently most pedigrees are instead presented as “family trees”, and most phylogenies are presented as phylogenetic trees. Nevertheless, the historical development of concepts shows that networks pre-dated trees in most fields of biology, including the study of pedigrees, biology theory, and biology practice, as well as in historical linguistics in the social sciences. Trees were actually introduced in order to provide a simpler conceptual model for historical relationships, since trees are a specific type of simple network. Computationally, trees and networks are a part of graph theory, consisting of nodes connected by edges. In this mathematical context they differ solely in the absence or presence of reticulation nodes, respectively. There are two types of graphs that can be called phylogenetic networks: (1) rooted evolutionary networks, and (2) unrooted affinity networks. There are quite a few computational methods for unrooted networks, which have two main roles in phylogenetics: (a) they act as a generic form of multivariate data display; and (b) they are used specifically to represent haplotype networks. Evolutionary networks are more difficult to infer and analyse, as there is no mathematical algorithm for reconstructing unique historical events. There is thus currently no coherent analytical framework for computing such networks.
Martin West is widely recognized as one of the most significant classicists of all time. Over nearly half a century his publications have transformed our understanding of Greek poetry. This book celebrates his achievement with twenty-five chapters on different areas of the subject which he has illuminated, written by distinguished scholars from four continents. It also includes West's Balzan Prize acceptance speech, Forward into the Past, in which he explains his approach to literary scholarship, and a complete bibliography of his academic publications.
How do we manage to speak and understand language? How do children acquire these skills and how does the brain support them? These psycholinguistic issues have been studied for more than two centuries. Though many Psycholinguists tend to consider their history as beginning with the Chomskyan 'cognitive revolution' of the late 1950s/1960s, the history of empirical psycholinguistics actually goes back to the end of the eighteenth century. This book tells the fascinating history of the doctors, pedagogues, linguists, and psychologists who created this discipline, looking at how they made their important discoveries about the language regions in the brain, about the high-speed accessing of words in speaking and listening, on the child's invention of syntax, on the disruption of language in aphasic patients and so much more. Psycholinguistics has four historical roots, which, by the end of the nineteenth century, had merged. By then, the discipline, usually called the psychology of language, was established. The first root was comparative linguistics, which raised the issue of the psychological origins of language. The second root was the study of language in the brain, with Franz Gall as the pioneer and the Broca and Wernicke discoveries as major landmarks. The third root was the diary approach to child development, which emerged from Rousseau's Émile. The fourth root was the experimental laboratory approach to speech and language processing, which originated from Franciscus Donders' mental chronometry. Wilhelm Wundt unified these four approaches in his monumental Die Sprache of 1900. These four perspectives of psycholinguistics continued into the twentieth century but in quite divergent frameworks. There was German consciousness and thought psychology, Swiss/French and Prague/Viennese structuralism, Russian and American behaviorism, and almost aggressive holism in aphasiology. As well as reviewing all these perspectives, the book looks at the deep disruption of the field during the Third Reich and its optimistic, multidisciplinary re-emergence during the 1950s with the mathematical theory of communication as a major impetus.
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