Explorations in automated language classification

Holman, Eric W.; Wichmann, Søren; Brown, Cecil H.; Velupillai, Viveka; Müller, André; Bakker, Dik

doi:10.1515/flin.2008.331

Cited by 154 publications

(132 citation statements)

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“…When languages that are unrelated both in terms of genealogical relations and areal influence are compared words referring to the same concepts are not expected to be more similar than words referring to different concepts. According to [5], however, even in languages in different families located more than 10,000 km apart, the words for the same concept are slightly more similar to each other than are the words for different concepts. The authors mentioned universal tendencies such as sound symbolism as a possible explanation for this similarity, but they did not go further in trying to identify specific sounds involved in sound symbolism or the effects of this phenomenon on the typical shapes of words.…”

Section: Come Die Dog Drink Ear Eye Fire Fish Full Hand Heamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The concepts in question represent a 40-item subset of the list of 100 (relatively) culture-neutral items of [4]. These items were selected not for their susceptibility to sound symbolism but rather for their phonological stability across time: specifically, they were identified in [5] as the concepts for which the words were most similar phonologically in languages known to be related by common descent. The database is therefore unbiased with respect to sound symbolism, because it was developed for the purpose of producing automated language classifications [6,7] and for investigating other issues of a historical linguistic nature, including the identification of linguistic homelands [8] and the calculation of dates for the break-up of proto-languages using a technique similar to glottochronology.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sound Symbolism in Basic Vocabulary

Wichmann

Holman

Brown

2010

Entropy

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Abstract:The relationship between meanings of words and their sound shapes is to a large extent arbitrary, but it is well known that languages exhibit sound symbolism effects violating arbitrariness. Evidence for sound symbolism is typically anecdotal, however. Here we present a systematic approach. Using a selection of basic vocabulary in nearly one half of the world's languages we find commonalities among sound shapes for words referring to same concepts. These are interpreted as due to sound symbolism. Studying the effects of sound symbolism cross-linguistically is of key importance for the understanding of language evolution.

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Section: Come Die Dog Drink Ear Eye Fire Fish Full Hand Heamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sound Symbolism in Basic Vocabulary

Wichmann

Holman

Brown

2010

Entropy

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“…Reliable methods for quantifying the distance between languages are scarce (Schepens et al 2013), although some advances have been made (see e.g. lexicostatistical studies by Gray & Atkinson (2003) and Holman et al (2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceived similarity between written Estonian and Finnish: Strings of letters or morphological units?

Kaivapalu

Martin

2017

Nord J Linguist

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The distance or similarity between two languages can be objective or actual, i.e. discoverable by the tools and methods of linguists, or perceived by users of the languages. In this article two methods, the Levenshtein Distance (LD), which purports to measure the objective distance, and the Index of Perceived Similarity (IPS), which quantifies language users’ perceptions, are compared. The data are the quantitative results of a test measuring conscious perceptions of similarity between Estonian and Finnish inflectional morphology by Finnish and Estonian native speakers (‘Finns’ and ‘Estonians’) with no knowledge of and exposure to the other (‘target’) language. The results show that Finns see more similarity between Finnish and Estonian than Estonians do. Also the correlations between LD and the perception results of the Finns are statistically significant while the correlations between the LD and the IPS scores of the Estonians are not. Comments by test participants provide insights into the nature of the perceptions of similarity.

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“…Beyond these short lists, little is known in quantitative terms about the dynamics of lexical change, and even within the 100-item list, the factors that contribute to making some items more or less stable than others are not well understood. The possibility that some items are less stable because they tend to be borrowed more often was investigated [10], but no correlation was found between borrowability and stability. However, stability and frequency have been found to be correlated [11], indicating that words that are used often tend to survive better than infrequently used words.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Universals versus historical contingencies in lexical evolution

Bochkarev

Solovyev

Wichmann

2014

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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The frequency with which we use different words changes all the time, and every so often, a new lexical item is invented or another one ceases to be used. Beyond a small sample of lexical items whose properties are well studied, little is known about the dynamics of lexical evolution. How do the lexical inventories of languages, viewed as entire systems, evolve? Is the rate of evolution of the lexicon contingent upon historical factors or is it driven by regularities, perhaps to do with universals of cognition and social interaction? We address these questions using the Google Books N-Gram Corpus as a source of data and relative entropy as a measure of changes in the frequency distributions of words. It turns out that there are both universals and historical contingencies at work. Across several languages, we observe similar rates of change, but only at timescales of at least around five decades. At shorter timescales, the rate of change is highly variable and differs between languages. Major societal transformations as well as catastrophic events such as wars lead to increased change in frequency distributions, whereas stability in society has a dampening effect on lexical evolution.

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Explorations in automated language classification

Cited by 154 publications

References 10 publications

Sound Symbolism in Basic Vocabulary

Sound Symbolism in Basic Vocabulary

Perceived similarity between written Estonian and Finnish: Strings of letters or morphological units?

Universals versus historical contingencies in lexical evolution

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