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Understanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model
Edited by Siva Kalyan, Alexandre François and Harald Hammarström
[Journal of Historical Linguistics 9:1] 2019
► pp. 92–127

Subgrouping the Sogeram languages

A critical appraisal of Historical Glottometry

| Australian National University / Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language | Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language
| Australian National University / Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language | Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language
| Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language

Historical Glottometry is a method, recently proposed by Kalyan and François (François 2014; Kalyan & François 2018), for analyzing and representing the relationships among sister languages in a language family. We present a glottometric analysis of the Sogeram language family of Papua New Guinea and, in the process, provide an evaluation of the method. We focus on three topics that we regard as problematic: how to handle the higher incidence of cross-cutting isoglosses in the Sogeram data; how best to handle lexical innovations; and what to do when the data do not allow the analyst to be sure whether a given language underwent a given innovation or not. For each topic we compare different ways of coding and calculating the data and suggest the best way forward. We conclude by proposing changes to the way glottometric data are coded and calculated and the way glottometric results are visualized. We also discuss how to incorporate Historical Glottometry into an effective historical-linguistic research workflow.

Keywords: Historical Glottometry, subgrouping, language diversification, comparative reconstruction, Sogeram languages, Madang languages, Papuan languages
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Models of linguistic relatedness and subgrouping
    • 1.2The Sogeram languages
  • 2.The data and the method
    • 2.1The Sogeram innovations dataset
    • 2.2Calculating relatedness: The method of Historical Glottometry
  • 3.The glottometric view of the Sogeram languages
    • 3.1Cross-cutting isoglosses
    • 3.2Lexical replacement
    • 3.3Blank cells in glottometric datasets
  • 4.Discussion and conclusions
    • 4.1Improving the method
    • 4.2Historical Glottometry as part of the historical linguist’s toolkit
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.17011.dan
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