
	Where results make sense

Topic: Glottochronology

Related Topics

Historical linguistics

Swadesh list

Morris Swadesh

Pali language

Turkic languages

Magadhi language

Cognate

Rotokas alphabet

Maori language

Paronym

Alphabet

Fiji coups of 1987

Black Sea deluge theory

Sumerian king list

History of Fiji

In the News (Fri 11 Dec 09)

Northern Trust

Marvin Harrison

Peter Chernin

Gary Locke

Match Play

Penelope Cruz

Mickey Rourke

AR Rahman

Danny Boyle

Hugh Jackman

	glottochronology Information Center - glottochronology
		Glottochronology was a linguistics method used to estimate the time of divergence of two related languages.
		The glottochronology method presumes that the core vocabulary of a language is replaced at a constant (or near constant) rate, and therefore can be used to measure the passage of time.
		Glottochronology is no longer considered a valid technique by mainstream linguists, because there is no evidence to support the assumption that language change occurs at a steady rate, and much evidence to support the idea that languages change alternately very slowly and very quickly.
	www.scipeeps.com /Sci-Linguistic_Topics_Cr_-_G/glottochronology.html (286 words)

	Glottochronology at AllExperts
		This assumption, originally put forward by Morris Swadesh, was based on an analogy with the use of C14 dating for measuring the age of organic materials, in that a "lexical half-life" is estimated and used to extrapolate to the point in time at which the languages in question diverged from a common proto-language.
		Glottochronology is rejected by mainstream linguists, who view it as having been falsified by many counterexamples.
		On the other hand, it shows that glottochronology can really only be used as a serious tool on language families the historical phonology of which has been meticulously elaborated (at least to the point of being able to clearly distinguish between cognates and loanwords).
	en.allexperts.com /e/g/gl/glottochronology.htm (776 words)

	Reference.com/Encyclopedia/Glottochronology
		Glottochronology is a method in linguistics used to estimate the rate at which languages change, based on the assumption that the basic vocabulary of a language changes at a roughly constant rate.
		Glottochronology does not presume that language as a whole always changes at a stable rate (including its phonology or grammar), nor does it deny the possibility of rapid lexical loss in the "cultural" layer of the lexicon under specific circumstances.
		On the other hand, it shows that glottochronology can really only be used as a serious scientific tool on language families the historical phonology of which has been meticulously elaborated (at least to the point of being able to clearly distinguish between cognates and loanwords).
	www.reference.com /browse/wiki/Glottochronology (1290 words)

	Public Anthropology
		Glottochronology is thought to show that vocabulary in a language changes at a constant rate.
		Glottochronology is a method for estimating the approximate date that any two languages, or group of languages, split.
		Supporters of glottochronology do not deny that specific examples exist where the rate of phonetic change does not apply; however they suggest that these are exceptions to an otherwise consistent trend.
	www.publicanthropology.org /Archive/Ca1962.htm (7269 words)

	Glottochronology
		In linguistics, the technique of glottochronology is used to estimate the time of divergence of two related languages.
		It is analogous to the use of C14 dating of organic materials in that a "lexical half-life" is estimated and used to extrapolate to the time the two languages being compared diverged.
		The larger the percentage of cognates, the more recently the two languages being compared are presumed to have separated.
	www.ebroadcast.com.au /lookup/encyclopedia/gl/Glottochronology.html (202 words)

	PROTO INDO EUROPEAN DATING
		Glottochronology is the name given to "dating" languages by looking at changes between earlier and later vocabularies.
		The principle behind glottochronology is the simple assumption that the rate of change of the form of words is constant.
		This does not mean that every analysis should not state clearly what data are being assumed and there is simply no excuse for not recognizing statistical limits and particularly for not over-stating the accuracy of the results.
	www.zianet.com /docdavey/piedating.htm (3847 words)

	Breaking News!
		Glottochronology was invented by the linguist Morris Swadesh in 1952.
		The idea is to infer words for items in the material culture of an early language, and to correlate them with the appearance of such items in the archaeological record.
		He added that their argument assumed a constant rate of language change, the very point they know is wrong in glottochronology.
	www.neara.org /MiscReports/03-16-04.htm (1680 words)

	GLOTTOCHRONOLOGY (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-08)
		But now suppose some eager scholar were to try to do the same thing with manuscripts which were not known to be copies of the same original text.
		The result would be gibberish, and the same is true of any attempts to use lexicostatistics or glottochronology to establish historical relationships not already known to exist.
		What lex attempts to do is to provide a rough measure of the degree of linguistic distance between languages already known to be related; what glotto tries to do, very dubiously, is to convert the result into a time depth for separation.
	www.mega.nu:8080 /protolanguage/comment-Glottochronology.htm (348 words)

	alan little's weblog
		One is that they published in Nature – a journal with no linguistics expertise – and in the form of a five-page letter with nowhere near enough detail for a serious assessment of their methods.
		The other is that, from what little their letter describes of their method, it appears to be similar to a discredited technique in historical linguistics known as glottochronology, dating from the 1950s.
		Glottochronology attempted to date when languages that are known or assumed to have a common ancestor diverged by measuring differences in their vocabulary.
	alanlittle.org /weblog/IndoEuropean.html (673 words)

	Language Log: Good glottochronology
		In particular, it's not as well known as it should be that some ethnohistorians routinely use a variety of linguistic methods, including lexicostatistics and glottochronology, and that professional linguists by and large approve and even collaborate.
		In order to assign dates, classical glottochronology (based to a large extent on word lists she gathered herself in the field) was her main tool.
		I think this is terrific work, and would argue that its application of lexicostatistics and glottochronology is entirely appropriate, given the usual caveats about interpretation of the results (which Edda is careful to express).
	itre.cis.upenn.edu /~myl/languagelog/archives/000211.html (476 words)

	washingtonpost.com: Mother Tongue May Be Older Than Many Think
		The new analysis, reported in today's edition of the journal Nature, retraces the same ground as a controversial discipline called "glottochronology" -- calculating dates of language divergence by examining cognates, or words that are similar in two or more languages.
		We know that languages tend to undergo word substitution over time, but if the rate of change is constant, Swadesh thought he could date languages.
		Gray, however, said his analysis overcomes these problems because it uses sophisticated statistical techniques "that can infer family trees, genealogies and even dates of change" with a rigor never contemplated by Swadesh or his detractors.
	www.washingtonpost.com /ac2/wp-dyn/A16616-2003Nov26?language=printer (716 words)

	glottochronology - OneLook Dictionary Search
		We found 10 dictionaries with English definitions that include the word glottochronology:
		Tip: Click on the first link on a line below to go directly to a page where "glottochronology" is defined.
		Example: "He mapped the glottochronology of the Romance languages"
	www.onelook.com /?w=glottochronology (102 words)

	INDO EUROPEAN INVASIONS OF EUROPE
		We argue that our unique study is proof of the principle of the validity of "glottochronology" and that, since our study is much more comprehensive than previous work and statistically more accurate, the results are superior to those of previously available.
		However, we point out that the entire process of glottochronology is empirical and caution that these methods may not apply to other language groups.
		But not all the Germans moved away from the Baltic since the Swedes are found there later, and this separation may have been the result of the movement of the Balts.
	www.zianet.com /docdavey/europeinvasions.htm (1823 words)

	LINGUIST List 9.757: Limits on Knowledge in Linguistics
		Such stuff is, of course, dubious both because of the dubious character of glottochronology itself and because by now no one seems sure what these numbers are or ought to be (and, yes, Nichols indeed waffles on this matter egregiously).
		Glottochronology supposes (on the basis of test cases like Vulgar Latin and others) a rate of change around 17 or 18% loss per millennium.
		Of course, there still remains the good old comparative method, which, depending on what the residue is, might just be able to provide some evidence, and syntactic or morphological evidence, which is supposedly (reference: general knowledge osmosed in the linguistic community) more resistant to change might also allow us to push the limen back.
	www.ling.ed.ac.uk /linguist/issues/9/9-757.html (746 words)

	The History of the Cherokees
		It is based upon the number of cognate words in the two languages among a core vocabulary of about two hundred words.
		This method, called glottochronology, gives an estimate of 6 thousand years for the time of separation between the Cherokee language and the other Iroquois languages.
		Glottochronology is subject to a high margin of error and many doubt its validity at all.
	www2.sjsu.edu /faculty/watkins/cherokee.htm (927 words)

	IE Lexicostat: Bibliography (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-08)
		The oldest and most widely-used lexicostatistical approach uses the "lexicostatistical percentage" to estimate the degree of relationship between two speech varieties (in the same language family): the higher the percentage, the more recent their divergence from a common ancestor and thus the closer their historical relationship.
		For glottochronology, as explained most fully in Kruskal, Dyen, and Black 1973, this simplifying assumption seriously distorts the time estimates, but more realistic models can be and have been applied.
		Fodor, I. The validity of glottochronology on the basis of the Slovonic languages.
	www.ntu.edu.au /education/langs/ielex/BIBLIOG.html (1326 words)

	Linguistics and the Peopling of the Americas (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-08)
		Glottochronology is a technique for calculating an absolute date for when two related languages diverged by comparing the retention of vocabulary shared by the two languages.
		A constant rate of vocabulary loss is assumed for certain categories of words, and a date in years is calculated that is inversely proportional to the number of shared words in the vocabularies.
		Unfortunately, glottochronology has been shown to produce erroneous results and the basic assumptions underlying this method are not generally accepted (Bynon 1977).
	www.ualberta.ca /~nativest/pim/zazula.html (5722 words)

	Public Anthropology
		He states that glottochronology examines the rate of change in languages which may be used to infer historical timeframes and provide an analysis of relationships in a language family.
		Hymes continues by explaining the foundations of glottochronology: the use of basic vocabulary for the test list; the ongoing development of test lists; the examination of control cases which involve languages at different stages in a single line of development; and the retention rates of words in languages as they change.
		Apart from glottochronology, lexicostatistics may be further developed to examine sub-groupings in language families, determine genetic relationships among languages, and analyze rates of lexical change.
	www.publicanthropology.org /Archive/Ca1960.htm (4381 words)

	Glottochronology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		It is highly likely that the chances of being replaced are in fact different for every word or feature ("each word has its own history").
		Thus, in Bergsland and Vogt 1962 the authors managed to make an impressive demonstration, on the basis of actual language data verifiable by extra-linguistic sources, that the "rate of change" for Icelandic constituted around 4% per millennium, whereas for Riksmal (Literary Norwegian) it would amount to as much as 20%.
		In J. Redden (Ed.), Papers for the American Indian language conference, held at the University of California, Santa Cruz, July and August, 1991 (pp.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Glottochronology (1342 words)

	Archaeology Wordsmith (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-08)
		By studying the rate of change, the length of time (time depth) during which two related languages developed independently may be calculated.
		glottochronology relies on statistical comparison of the basic vocabulary shared by two or more related languages and on the assumption that the rate of vocabulary replacement is constant over sufficiently long periods of time.
		It is a way of arriving at a date of separation between two languages that have a common origin by studying the extent to which they have diverged from each other and provides archaeologists with approximate dates for the origination of subcultures diverging from each other.
	www.reference-wordsmith.com /cgi-bin/lookup.cgi?category=&where=headword&terms=glottochronology (363 words)

	No. 1566: Glottochronology
		A linguist named Swadesh looked at this process of change in the early '50s, and he invented the new term glottochronology -- literally, the timetable of tongues.
		Glottochronology is the mathematical study of these changes.
		Glottochronology is clearly an inexact science, subject to many variables.
	www.uh.edu /admin/engines/epi1566.htm (575 words)

	Amazon.com: glottochronology (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-08)
		The ABC's of lexicostatistics (glottochronology) (Bobbs-Merrill reprint series in the social sciences) by Sarah C Gudchinsky (Unknown Binding - 1966)
		Glottochronology: An application of calculus to linguistics (Modules and monographs in undergraduate mathematics and its applications) by Anthony Lo Bello (Unknown Binding - 1983)
		The mathematical models of glottochronology (Bobbs-Merrill reprint series in language and linguistics) by C. Douglas ChreÌtien (Unknown Binding - 1966)
	www.amazon.com /s?ie=UTF8&keywords=glottochronology&tag=lexico&index=blended&link_code=qs&page=1 (747 words)

	GLOTTOCHRONOLLOGY AND ITS APPLICATION IN SLAVONIC LANGUAGES
		In the first part of our study the ‘classical’ glottochronology with its variant modified by Sergei Starostin is presented.
		In the second part the application of both classical and modified glottochronology for the Slavic languages is discussed.
		Our analysis was based on Starostin’s variant of glottochronology, with our modification concerning synonyms which are calculated too.
	www.phil.muni.cz /sborniky/rada_jazykovedna/dataweb05/1statiresume/04novotnablazek.htm (69 words)

	[b-hebrew] Fw: Roots Language
		> > Glottochronology was invented by the linguist Morris Swadesh in 1952.
		It > is based on the compiling of a core list of 100 or 200 words that Swadesh > believed were particularly resistant to change.
		It assumed that languages changed at a constant rate, and it was > vulnerable to unrecognized borrowings of words by one language from > another, making them seem closer than they really were.
	lists.ibiblio.org /pipermail/b-hebrew/2004-March/017686.html (1578 words)

	Lexicostatistics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Lexicostatistics is an approach to comparative linguistics that involves quantative comparison of cognates.
		It is to be distinguished from glottochronology, which attempts to use lexicostatistical methods to estimate the length of time since two or more languages diverged from a common earlier proto-language.
		This is merely one application of lexicostatistics, however, and other applications of it may not share the assumption of a constant rate of change for basic lexical items.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Lexicostatistics (117 words)

	Glottochronology - IRC (#MZTF) Blog (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-08)
		Yeah, but i dont think gravity should be classified as a field.
		A Swadesh list is a prescribed list of basic vocabulary developed by Morris Swadesh in the 1940-50s, which is used in glottochronology (lexicostatistical dating).
		given above, lexicostatistics includes the estimation of times at which language splits have occurred based on comparative lexical information, a technique often referred to as glottochronology.
	www.mztf.com /glottochronology.php (1181 words)

	[No title]
		It is in this spirit that most modern users of glottochronology work: They know it gives at best rough estimates, but when such limitations are openly acknowledged, rough estimates are arguably better than no estimate at all or estimates based on what Marisa Lohr calls âintuitive glottochronologyâ.
		And it is glottochronology, in one form or another, that most of the methodological papers address.
		They discuss why dating can be reasonably reliable in biology: biologists have learned to focus not on phenotypes, whose rate of evolution is heavily constrained by functionality, but on those molecules whose exact structure does not make a big difference to the functioning of the organism.
	www.artsci.wustl.edu /~bkessler/TimeDepth_review/TimeDepth.xml (1816 words)

Try your search on: Qwika (all wikis)