Language Classification by Numbers

by April McMahon, Robert McMahon

Overview

This book considers how languages have traditionally been divided into families, and asks how they should classified in the future. It describes and applies computer programs from biology and evolutionary genetics to data about languages and shows how the power of the computer can be harnessed to throw light on long-standing problems in historical linguistics. It tests current theories and hypotheses, shows how new ideas can be formulated, and offers a series of demonstrations that the new techniques applied to old data can produce convincing results that are sometimes startlingly at odds with accepted wisdom. April and Robert McMahon combine the expertise and perspectives of an historical linguist and a geneticist. They analyse the links between linguistic and population genetics, and consider how far language can be used to discover and understand the histories and interrelations of human populations. They explore the origins and formation of the Indo-European languages and examine less well studied languages in South America. Their book will be of great practical importance to students and researchers in historical and comparative linguistics and will interest all those concerned with the classification and diffusion of languages in fields such as archaeology, genetics, and anthropology. Its approachable style will appeal to general readers seeking to know more about the relationship between linguistic and human history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199279029
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/02/2006
Series:	Oxford Linguistics Ser.
Pages:	283
Product dimensions:	9.60(w) x 6.70(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

University of Edinburgh

Western General Hospital, Edinburgh

Table of Contents

1. How do Linguists Classify Languages?
2. Lexicostatistics
3. Tree-Based Quantitative Approaches - Computational Cladistics
4. Tree-Based Quantitative Approaches: Sublists
5. Correlations Between Genetic and Linguistic Data
6. Climbing Down from the Trees: Network Models
7. Dating
8. Quantitative Methods Beyond the Lexicon

Editorial Reviews

"The book is very readable and well written, often slyly humorous, and filled with much good sense. It fills a great need for an introductory survey of numerical methods in language classification. It serves very well as a gentle yet informative introduction to the field, and does so in a very accessible way that makes it a good read for the general linguist, as well as for anyoen contemplating taking up numerical classification in the future." —Anthropological Linguistics

From the Publisher