This article surveys various long-standing ambiguities and confusions that continue to dog lexicostatistics and glottochronology. I aim to offer some novel perspectives and clarifications, which also help map out how we might devise new, alternative methods to build upon the good in Swadesh’s troubled legacy. I challenge the recent trend towards honing down Swadesh’s original list to a minimal core. A richer signal on language relationships is to be had not by discarding the data in meanings considered ‘unstable’, but by exploring the revealing patterns that emerge only when those meanings are kept, and contrasted against their ‘core’ counterparts.
GEORGESCU, SIMONA, ALINA MARIA CRISTEA, ANCA DINU, LIVIU DINU, BOGDAN IORDACHE, ANA SABINA UBAN & LAURENȚIU ZOICAȘ
2023. Recursos digitales para el análisis del léxico de origen latino en las lenguas románicas. Studii și cercetări lingvistice 2023:1 ► pp. 65 ff.
Gerardi, Fabrício Ferraz, Stanislav Reichert & Carolina Coelho Aragon
2021. TuLeD (Tupían lexical database): introducing a database of a South American language family. Language Resources and Evaluation 55:4 ► pp. 997 ff.
Greenhill, Simon J., Paul Heggarty & Russell D. Gray
2020. Bayesian Phylolinguistics. In The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, ► pp. 226 ff.
Heggarty, Paul
2014. Prehistory by Bayesian phylogenetics? The state of the art on Indo-European origins. Antiquity 88:340 ► pp. 566 ff.
Vasilescu, Bogdan, Alexander Serebrenik & Mark G. J. van den Brand
2013. The Babel of Software Development: Linguistic Diversity in Open Source. In Social Informatics [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 8238], ► pp. 391 ff.
Watson, Rachel
2018. Patterns of lexical correlation and divergence in Casamance. Language & Communication 62 ► pp. 170 ff.
2016. How Many Is Enough?—Statistical Principles for Lexicostatistics. Frontiers in Psychology 7
Ziemendorff, Michaela, Jairo Valqui Culqui & Stefan Ziemendorff
2023. Observaciones metodológicas sobre el estudio de lenguas extintas en el nororiente peruano: el caso del chacha. Letras (Lima) 94:139 ► pp. 16 ff.
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