Part of
Quantitative Approaches to Linguistic Diversity: Commemorating the centenary of the birth of Morris SwadeshEdited by Søren Wichmann and Anthony P. Grant
[Benjamins Current Topics 46] 2012
► pp. 87–111
Following certain aspects of the work on lexicostatistics carried out in the 1960s and published thereafter (Hooley 1971, Miller et al. 1971, Miller 1984) and thereby working in a tradition which has most recently been practised by Ringe et al. (1997, 2001), among others, I maintain that much of lasting value can be learned about linguistic interrelationships by using techniques which have been developed in work on qualitative (rather than merely quantitative) lexicostatistics, using character-based methods.