User:Ioe bidome/Glottochronology

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“”Glottochronology must be about the only scientic technique where the accuracy of one’s results is enhanced by the removal rather than the augmentation of data!

—J. P. Mallory and Douglas Adams

Glottochronology, also called lexicostatistics, is a method of estimating the relationships between languages. It involves the comparison of several languages' basic vocabulary and then deriving a date of diversion. In some ways, glottochronology can be compared to genetic analyses or carbon dating. Glottochronology was invented by Morris Swadesh, a historical linguist in the 1950s.

Description

Assumptions

Glottochronology rests on several assumptions:

1. That there is a basic vocabulary that is culture-free. This is assembled into a Swadesh list, a list of 100 words. These words include various body parts, basic verbs, colors, taxonomic terms like "fish", "bird" or "tree", various pronoun forms, Sun, Moon, Star, and geographic terms like "mountain".
2. That this basic, culture-free vocabulary is lost at a rate of 14% every thousand years.
3. That this rate is constant across languages
4. That one can compute the time of divergence between two languages when the amount of basic vocabulary cognates between them becomes known.

Why it doesn't work

Basic vocabulary

A lot of items on the Swadesh list are not actually culture-free or are easily borrowable.