Languages evolve over time in a process in which reproduction, mutation andextinction are all possible, similar to what happens to living organisms. Usingthis similarity it is possible, in principle, to build family trees which showthe degree of relatedness between languages. The method used by modern glottochronology, developed by Swadesh in the1950s, measures distances from the percentage of words with a common historicalorigin. The weak point of this method is that subjective judgment plays arelevant role. Recently we proposed an automated method that avoids the subjectivity, whoseresults can be replicated by studies that use the same database and thatdoesn't require a specific linguistic knowledge. Moreover, the method allows aquick comparison of a large number of languages. We applied our method to the Indo-European and Austronesian families,considering in both cases, fifty different languages. The resulting trees aresimilar to those of previous studies, but with some important differences inthe position of few languages and subgroups. We believe that these differencescarry new information on the structure of the tree and on the phylogeneticrelationships within families.
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