Cover not available
Article published In:
Diachronica
Vol. 39:1 (2022) ► pp.1–38

Reflex prediction

A case study of Western Kho-Bwa

ORCID logo | University of London
| Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

While analysing lexical data of Western Kho-Bwa languages of the Sino-Tibetan or Trans-Himalayan family with the help of a computer-assisted approach for historical language comparison, we observed gaps in the data where one or more varieties lacked forms for certain concepts. We employed a new workflow, combining manual and automated steps, to predict the most likely phonetic realisations of the missing forms in our data, by making systematic use of the information on sound correspondences in words that were potentially cognate with the missing forms. This procedure yielded a list of hypothetical reflexes of previously identified cognate sets, which we first preregistered as an experiment on the prediction of unattested word forms and then compared with actual word forms elicited during secondary fieldwork. In this study we first describe the workflow which we used to predict hypothetical reflexes and the process of elicitation of actual word forms during fieldwork. We then present the results of our reflex prediction experiment. Based on this experiment, we identify four general benefits of reflex prediction in historical language comparison. These comprise (1) an increased transparency of linguistic research, (2) an increased efficiency of field and source work, (3) an educational aspect which offers teachers and learners a wide plethora of linguistic phenomena, including the regularity of sound change, and (4) the possibility of kindling speakers’ interest in their own linguistic heritage.

Keywords: prediction, word prediction, comparative method, regularity of sound change, computer-assisted language comparison, Western Kho-Bwa, preregistered research, reflex prediction
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Predicting reflexes of cognate words in Western Kho-Bwa languages
    • 2.1The Western Kho-Bwa languages
    • 2.2Background of the study
    • 2.3Workflow for reflex prediction
    • 2.4Elicitation
    • 2.5Evaluation
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1General results
    • 3.2Specific results
  • 4.Benefits of reflex prediction
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Supplementary material
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 23 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.20009.bod
References
Amery, Rob
2016 Warraparna Kaurna! Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blevins, Juliette
2004 Evolutionary phonology: The emergence of sound patterns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bodt, Timotheus Adrianus
2014a Ethnolinguistic survey of Westernmost Arunachal Pradesh. A fieldworker’s impressions. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 37.2: 198–239. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014b Notes on the settlement of the Gongri River valley of Western Arunachal Pradesh. In Anna Balikci Denjongpa & Jenny Bentley (eds.), The dragon and the hidden land: Social and historical studies on Sikkim and Bhutan. Proceedings of the Bhutan-Sikkim Panel at the 13th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, 153–190. Ulaanbataar: International Association for Tibetan Studies.Google Scholar
2019 The Duhumbi perspective on Proto-Western Kho-Bwa rhymes. Die Sprache 521 (2016 / 2017) 21: 141–176.Google Scholar
2021 The Duhumbi perspective on Proto-Western Kho-Bwa onsets. Historical Linguistics 11.1: 1–59. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bodt, Timotheus A. & Johann-Mattis List
2019 Testing the predictive strength of the comparative method: An ongoing experiment on unattested words in Western Kho- Bwa languages. Papers in Historical Phonology 4 (1): 22–44. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2020 The multiple benefits of making predictions in linguistics. Babel: The Language Magazine 311: 8–12.Google Scholar
Bodt, Timotheus A., Nathan W. Hill & Johann-Mattis List
2018 Prediction experiment for missing words in Kho-Bwa language data. Open science framework preregistrations October 5. [URL]
Branner, David Prager
2006 Some composite phonological systems in Chinese. In David Prager Branner (ed.), The Chinese rime tables: Linguistic philosophy and historical-comparative phonology, 209–232. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Driem, George van
2001 Languages of the Himalayas: An ethnolinguistic handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region. 21. Leiden: Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons & Charles D. Fennig
(eds.) 2019 Ethnologue: Languages of the world. Twenty-second edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. [URL]
Forkel, Robert, Johann-Mattis List, Simon J. Greenhill, Christoph Rzymski, Sebastian Bank, Michael Cysouw, Harald Hammarström, Martin Haspelmath, Gereon A. Kaiping & Russell D. Gray
2018 Cross-linguistic data formats, advancing data sharing and re-use in comparative linguistics. Scientific Data 5 (180205): 1–10. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Genetti, Carol
2016 The Tibeto-Burman languages of South Asia: The languages, histories, and genetic classification. In Hans Heinrich Hock & Elena Bashir (eds.), The languages and linguistics of South Asia: A comprehensive guide, 130–154. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Joseph H.
1963 Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In Joseph H. Greenberg, Universals of human language, 73–113. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Grimm, Jacob
1822 Deutsche Grammatik. Erster Theil. Göttingen: Dieterich.Google Scholar
Hammarström, Harald, Robert Forkel & Martin Haspelmath
2020 Glottolog. Version 4.2.1. Jena, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. [URL]
Lieberherr, Ismael & Timotheus Adrianus Bodt
2017 Sub-grouping Kho-Bwa based on shared core vocabulary. Himalayan Linguistics 16 (2): 25–63.Google Scholar
List, Johann-Mattis
2017 A web-based interactive tool for creating, inspecting, editing, and publishing etymological datasets. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. System Demonstrations, 9–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2019 Automatic inference of sound correspondence patterns across multiple languages. Computational Linguistics 1 (45): 137–61. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Michael, Lev, Natalia Chousou-Polydouri, Keith Bartolomei, Erin Donnelly, Vivian Wauters, Sérgio Meira & Zachary O’Hagan
2015 A Bayesian phylogenetic classification of Tupí-Guaraní. LIAMES 15 (2): 193–221. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nosek, Brian, Emorie D. Beck, Lorne Campell, Jessica K. Flake, Tom E. Hardwicke, David T. Mellor, Anna E. van ‘t Veer & Simine Vazire
2019 Preregistration is hard, and worthwhile. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 23(10): 815–818. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Post, Mark W. & Robbins Burling
2017 The Tibeto-Burman languages of Northeastern India. In Graham Thurgood & Randy J. LaPolla (eds.), The Sino-Tibetan languages, 213–233. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Schweikhard, N. & J.-M. List
2020 Developing an annotation framework for word formation processes in comparative linguistics. SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 17.1: 2–26.Google Scholar
Sims-Williams, P.
2018 Mechanising historical phonology. Transactions of the Philological Society. 116.3: 555–573. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Watkins, C.
1962 Indo-European origins of the Celtic verb. Volume I. The sigmatic aorist. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.Google Scholar
Wu, M.-S., N. Schweikhard, T. Bodt, N. Hill & J.-M. List
2020 Computer-assisted language comparison: State of the art. Journal of Open Humanities Data 6.2: 1–14. DOI logoGoogle Scholar