ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2015
Quantifying uncertainty in the phylogenetics of Australian numeral systems.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evaluation of Molecular Phylogenetic Trees by an Information-Theoretic Metric.Journal of molecular evolution · 2026Article
- On the grammar of restricted-range numeral systems.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- A phylogenetic analysis of numeral anchor choice in New Guinea and lowland South America.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Phylogenetic signal and rate of evolutionary change in language structures.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- The history of number words in the world's languages-what have we learnt so far?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Usage frequency and lexical class determine the evolution of kinship terms in Indo-European.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
- The deep history of the number words.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Phylogenetic approach to the evolution of color term systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Researchers have long been interested in the evolution of culture and the ways in which change in cultural systems can be reconstructed and tracked. Within the realm of language, these questions are increasingly investigated with Bayesian phylogenetic methods. However, such work in cultural phylogenetics could be improved by more explicit quantification of reconstruction and transition probabilities. We apply such methods to numerals in the languages of Australia. As a large phylogeny with almost universal 'low-limit' systems, Australian languages are ideal for investigating numeral change over time. We reconstruct the most likely extent of the system at the root and use that information to explore the ways numerals evolve. We show that these systems do not increment serially, but most commonly vary their upper limits between 3 and 5. While there is evidence for rapid system elaboration beyond the lower limits, languages lose numerals as well as gain them. We investigate the ways larger numerals build on smaller bases, and show that there is a general tendency to both gain and replace 4 by combining 2 + 2 (rather than inventing a new unanalysable word 'four'). We develop a series of methods for quantifying and visualizing the results.
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