Calculating false cognates
An extension of the Baxter & Manaster-Ramer solution and its application to the case of Pre-Greek
This paper presents an extension of Baxter & Manaster-Ramer’s (2000) approach to the problem of false cognates in the determination of relationships between languages. Their approach uses a Monte Carlo simulation to estimate how many lexical similarities we can expect to be due to chance between two lexical lists from different languages, and consequently how many are too many to be all false cognates. Although very efficient, their model has the shortcoming of being applicable only to simple lexical lists such as the Swadesh list, with one-to-one semantic correspondences between the individual terms. Here I present a new model that can be applied to any kind of word list, and can include comparisons between multiple terms sharing the same semantic field. After a theoretical description, a controlled test and a contra-test, I finally apply the method to a real test case, investigating the probability of relation between Pre-Greek, the nonIndo-European substrate of classical Greek, and Proto-Basque, Proto-Uralic and ‘Proto-Altaic’.
References
Baxter, William H
1995 ‘A stronger affinity … than could have been produced by accident’: A probabilistic comparison of Old Chinese and Tibeto-Burman. In
William S.-Y. Wang (ed.),
The ancestry of the Chinese language (
Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series 8), 1–39. Berkeley: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
Baxter, William H
1998 Response to Oswalt and Ringe. In
Joe Salmons &
Brian D. Joseph (eds.),
Nostratic: Sifting the evidence, 217–236. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Baxter, William H. & Alexis Manaster-Ramer
Baxter, William H. & Alexis Manaster-Ramer
2000 Beyond lumping and splitting: Probabilistic issues in historical linguistics. In
Colin Renfrew,
April McMahon &
Larry Trask (eds.),
Time depth in historical linguistics, 167–188. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Beekes, Robert S.P
2010 Etymological dictionary of Greek. Leiden: Brill.
Blažek, Václav
2005 Current progress in Altaic etymology.
Folia Orientalia 521. 237–254.
Cortelazzo, Manlio & Paolo Zolli
1979 Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana, 1st edn. Bologna: Zanichelli.
Doroszewski, Witold
1958–1969 Slownik jezyka polskiego, vols. 1–111. Warszawa: Wiedza Powszechna.
Duhoux, Yves
2007 Pre-Greek languages: Indirect evidence. In
Anastasios-Phoivos Christidēs,
Maria Arapopoulou &
Maria Chritē (eds.),
A history of ancient Greek: From the beginnings to late antiquity, 223–228. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dunn, Michael & Angela Terrill
Dybo, Anna V. & Georgiy Starostin
2008 In defense of the comparative method, or the end of the Vovin controversy.
Aspects of Comparative Linguistics 31. 109–258.
Facchetti, Giulio M
2003 Creta minoica: sulle tracce delle più antiche scritture d’Europa. Florence: LSOlschki.
Forster, Peter & Colin Renfrew
(eds.) 2006 Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge/Oxbow Books/David Brown Book Co.
Furnée, Edzard J
1972 Die wichtigsten konsonantischen Erscheinungen des Vorgriechischen: Mit einem Appendix über den Vokalismus. The Hague: Mouton.
Gelb, Ignace Jay
1973 Hurrians and Subarians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Georg, Stefan, Peter A. Michalove, Alexis Manaster-Ramer & Paul J. Sidwell
1999 Telling general linguists about Altaic.
Journal of Linguistics 35(1). 65–98.
Heggarty, Paul
2005 Enigmas en el origen de las lenguas andinas: aplicando nuevas técnicas a las incógnitas por resolver.
Revista Andina 401. 9–57.
Holman, Eric W., Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Viveka Velupillai, André Müller & Dik Bakker
2008 Explorations in automated language classification.
Folia Linguistica 42(2). 331–354.
Kessler, Brett & Annukka Lehtonen
2006 Multilateral comparison and significance testing of the Indo-Uralic question. In
Peter Forster &
Colin Renfrew (eds.),
Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, 33–42. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Kessler, Brett
2001 The significance of word lists. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Kessler, Brett
2007 Word similarity metrics and multilateral comparison. In
John Nerbonne,
T. Mark Ellison &
Grzegorz Kondrak (eds.),
Proceedings of the Ninth Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Morphology and Phonology
, 6–14. Prague: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Kondrak, Grzegorz
2009 Identification of cognates and recurrent sound correspondences in word lists.
Traitement automatique des langues 50(2). 201–235.
Martirosyan, Hrach K
2010 Etymological dictionary of the Armenian inherited lexicon. Leiden: Brill.
Rachewiltz, Igor de, Volker Rybatzki & Jinfu Hong
2010 Introduction to Altaic philology: Turkic, Mongolian, Manchu. Leiden: Brill.
Renfrew, Colin
1998 Word of Minos: The Minoan contribution to Mycenaean Greek and the linguistic geography of the Bronze Age Aegean.
Cambridge Archaeological Journal 8(2). 239–264.
Rocławski, Bronisław
1986 Zarys fonologii, fonetyki, fonotaktyki i fonostatystyki współczesnego języka polskiego. Gdańsk: Wydaw Uczelniane UG.
Sihler, Andrew L
1995 New comparative grammar of Greek and Latin. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Simone, Carlo De
2007 Greek and Etruscan. In
Anastasios-Phoivos Christidēs,
Maria Arapopoulou &
Maria Chritē (eds.),
A history of ancient Greek: From the beginnings to late antiquity, 786–791. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Starostin, Sergei, Anna Dybo & Oleg Mudrak
2003 Etymological dictionary of the Altaic languages. Leiden: Brill.
Turchin, Peter, Ilia Peiros & Murray Gell-Mann
2010 Analyzing genetic connections between languages by matching consonant classes.
Journal of Language Relationship [
Вопросы языкового родства] 31. 117–126.
Vovin, Alexander
2005 The end of the Altaic controversy.
Central Asiatic Journal 491. 71–132.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Kassian, Alexei S., George Starostin, Mikhail Zhivlov & Sergey A. Spirin
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.