ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Automated reconstruction of ancient languages using probabilistic models of sound change.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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12 citing papers in PubMed.
- One's Actions "Aging Poorly": An Integrative Egocentric Framework for Understanding Impression Management Errors and the Challenge of Temporal Impression Management.Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc · 2026Review
- Maltese as a merger of two worlds: A cross-language approach to phonotactic classification.PloS one · 2023Article
- Evolution and Trade-Off Dynamics of Functional Load.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- NorthEuraLex: a wide-coverage lexical database of Northern Eurasia.Language resources and evaluation · 2020Article
- Global-scale phylogenetic linguistic inference from lexical resources.Scientific data · 2018Article
- Article
- Unity and disunity in evolutionary sciences: process-based analogies open common research avenues for biology and linguistics.Biology direct · 2016Review
- How Many Is Enough?-Statistical Principles for Lexicostatistics.Frontiers in psychology · 2016Article
- Support for linguistic macrofamilies from weighted sequence alignment.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Article
- Detecting regular sound changes in linguistics as events of concerted evolution.Current biology : CB · 2015Article
- Tracing the roots of syntax with Bayesian phylogenetics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2014Article
- The descent of words.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2013Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
One of the oldest problems in linguistics is reconstructing the words that appeared in the protolanguages from which modern languages evolved. Identifying the forms of these ancient languages makes it possible to evaluate proposals about the nature of language change and to draw inferences about human history. Protolanguages are typically reconstructed using a painstaking manual process known as the comparative method. We present a family of probabilistic models of sound change as well as algorithms for performing inference in these models. The resulting system automatically and accurately reconstructs protolanguages from modern languages. We apply this system to 637 Austronesian languages, providing an accurate, large-scale automatic reconstruction of a set of protolanguages. Over 85% of the system's reconstructions are within one character of the manual reconstruction provided by a linguist specializing in Austronesian languages. Being able to automatically reconstruct large numbers of languages provides a useful way to quantitatively explore hypotheses about the factors determining which sounds in a language are likely to change over time. We demonstrate this by showing that the reconstructed Austronesian protolanguages provide compelling support for a hypothesis about the relationship between the function of a sound and its probability of changing that was first proposed in 1955.
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