Measuring Language Divergence by Intra-Lexical Comparison

摘要

This paper presents a method for building genetic language taxonomies based on a new approach to comparing lexical forms. Instead of comparing forms cross-linguistically, a matrix of language-internal similarities between forms is calculated. These matrices are then compared to give distances between languages. We argue that this coheres better with current thinking in linguistics and psy-cholinguistics, An implementation of this approach, called PHILOLOGICON, is described, along with its application to Dyen et al.'s (1992) ninety-five wordlists from Indo-European languages.