Subgrouping the Sogeram languages

Abstract

Historical Glottometry is a method, recently proposed by Kalyan and François (François 2014; Kalyan & François 2018), for analyzing and representing the relationships among sister languages in a language family. We present a glottometric analysis of the Sogeram language family of Papua New Guinea and, in the process, provide an evaluation of the method. We focus on three topics that we regard as problematic: how to handle the higher incidence of cross-cutting isoglosses in the Sogeram data; how best to handle lexical innovations; and what to do when the data do not allow the analyst to be sure whether a given language underwent a given innovation or not. For each topic we compare different ways of coding and calculating the data and suggest the best way forward. We conclude by proposing changes to the way glottometric data are coded and calculated and the way glottometric results are visualized. We also discuss how to incorporate Historical Glottometry into an effective historical-linguistic research workflow.

Tentatively tracing Trans‐New Guinea: A phylogenetic evaluation of potential deeper relationships.

“…Other than the erroneous inclusion of Osum, the language Apali is not inside West Sogeram but placed as a sister to the North Sogeram languages Mum and Sileibi (Sirva), and the language Kulsab (Kursav) does not cluster into East Sogeram but falls outside. The inconsistencies here are presumably due to the linkage like nature of East Sogeram and Apali containing inconsistent overlapping innovations across many languages suggesting a more reticulate network-like history than can be adequately reflected in a tree (Daniels et al 2019).…”

Interrogating the Egypto-Sudanic Arabic Connection

“…The method accomplishes this by integrating the key dialectological notion of the isogloss with the comparative method's focus on the common innovation, and labors to produce a diachronically interpretable measure of the relative strengths of multiple potential classificatory units revealed by analysis of a given dataset. Such an approach has been called for previously in the study of Arabic dialects (for a forcefully argued articulation, see Magidow 2017), and Historical Glottometry in particular has fruitfully filled this role in the examination of Boni dialect linkages (Elias 2019) and the Sogeram language family (Daniels et al 2019), among others. I offer a preliminary application of the method here not as a route to a definitive classificatory model, but instead as an exploratory exercise into new views which may inform future analysis of the Egypto-Sudanic data, failing the identification of a meaningful macro-level relationship based in shared migration history.…”