The dialect chain of the Timor-Alor-Pantar language family

Kaiping, Gereon A.; Klamer, Marian

doi:10.1163/22105832-bja10019

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…Kaiping [16] proposed a relatively innovative classification of the Alor-Pantar languages based on a systematic Bayesian phylogenetic approach, which adds up to the ongoing research inherent in the categorization and 'branching' of this Papuan sub-family.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding through the Numbers: Number Systems, Their Evolution, and Their Perception among Kula People from Alor Island, Southeastern Indonesia

Wu,

Perono Cacciafoco

2024

Humans

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This paper aims at documenting and reconstructing the linguistic processes generating and substantiating the use of number systems, numbers in general, elementary arithmetic, and the related concepts and notions among the Kula people from Alor Island, Southeastern Indonesia. The Kula is a Papuan population from the Alor–Pantar Archipelago (Timor area). The name of their language, Kula (or Kola), corresponds to the ethnonym. The language is, currently, endangered and not completely documented. At the level of linguistic features, numeral systems and the terms for numerals from Eastern Alor exhibit, to some extent, unique characteristics, if compared to other languages spoken in other sectors of the island. Therefore, the Kula numbering system is not only significant at the lexicological and lexicographic level, but also represents the essential role of cognitive strategies (e.g., the choice of the base for the numbering systems and the visual representation of counting with the aid of actual ‘objects’, like hands and fingers) in the coinage of numerical terms among the local speakers. Indeed, the development of numeral systems reflects the evolution of human language and the ability of humans to construct abstract numerical concepts. The way numerals are encoded and expressed in a language can impact the patterns according to which numerical notions are conceptualized and understood. Different numeral systems can indicate variations in cognitive processes involving notions of quantities and measurements. Therefore, the structure and characteristics of a numeral system may affect how numeral concepts are mentally represented and developed. This paper focuses on the number system of the Kula people and the lexical units used by the local speakers to indicate (and to explain) the numbers, with the related concepts, notions, and symbolism. The investigation delves into the degrees of abstraction of the Kula numeral system and tries to ascertain its origins and reconstruct it. Moreover, the article applies to the analysis a comparative approach, which takes into account several Papuan and Austronesian languages from Alor Island and Eastern Timor, with the dual aim of investigating, at a preliminary level, a possible common evolution and/or divergent naming processes in local numbering systems and their historical–linguistic and etymological origins.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding through the Numbers: Number Systems, Their Evolution, and Their Perception among Kula People from Alor Island, Southeastern Indonesia

Wu,

Perono Cacciafoco

2024

Humans

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“…Quite a few new methods have been proposed to address the detection of lexical borrowings (Problem 2). Among these are supervised approaches (which I had deliberately excluded, since I consider unsupervised approaches as more useful when it comes to inference problems) that made use of recurrent neural networks ( Miller et al , 2020 ), there are tree-based approaches that even try to identify the direction of borrowings ( Neureiter et al , 2022 ), 6 and there are numerous attempts to handle very speciﬁc cases of lexical borrowing, such as contact across language families ( Hantgan et al , 2022 ; List & Forkel, 2022 ) or contact induced by dominant languages ( Kaiping & Klamer, 2022 ; Miller & List, 2023 ).…”

Section: New and Old Open Problemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Open Problems in Computational Historical Linguistics

List

2023

Open Res Europe

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Problems constitute the starting point of all scientific research. The essay reflects on the different kinds of problems that scientists address in their research and discusses a list of 10 problems for the field of computational historical linguistics, that was proposed throughout 2019 in a series of blog posts. In contrast to problems identified in different contexts, these problems were considered to be solvable, but no solution could be proposed back then. By discussing the problems in the light of developments that have been made in the field during the past five years, a modified list is proposed that takes new insights into account but also finds that the majority of the problems has not yet been solved.

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Detecting contact in language trees: a Bayesian phylogenetic model with horizontal transfer

Neureiter

Ranacher

Efrat-Kowalsky

et al. 2022

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

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Phylogenetic trees are a central tool for studying language evolution and have wide implications for understanding cultural evolution as a whole. For example, they have been the basis of studies on the evolution of musical instruments, religious beliefs and political complexity. Bayesian phylogenetic methods are transparent regarding the data and assumptions underlying the inference. One of these assumptions—that languages change independently—is incompatible with the reality of language evolution, particularly with language contact. When speakers interact, languages frequently borrow linguistic traits from each other. Phylogenetic methods ignore this issue, which can lead to errors in the reconstruction. More importantly, they neglect the rich history of language contact. A principled way of integrating language contact in phylogenetic methods is sorely missing. We present , a Bayesian phylogenetic model with horizontal transfer for language evolution. The model efficiently infers the phylogenetic tree of a language family and contact events between its clades. The implementation is available as a package for the phylogenetics software BEAST 2. We apply in a simulation study and a case study on a subset of well-documented Indo-European languages. The simulation study demonstrates that correctly reconstructs the history of a simulated language family, including simulated contact events. Moreover, it shows that ignoring contact can lead to systematic errors in the estimated tree height, rate of change and tree topology, which can be avoided with . The case study confirms that reconstructs known contact events in the history of Indo-European and finds known loanwords, demonstrating its practical potential. The model has a higher statistical fit to the data than a conventional phylogenetic reconstruction, and the reconstructed tree height is significantly closer to well-attested estimates. Our method closes a long-standing gap between the theoretical and empirical models of cultural evolution. The implications are especially relevant for less documented language families, where our knowledge of past contacts and linguistic borrowings is limited. Since linguistic phylogenies have become the backbone of many studies of cultural evolution, the addition of this integral piece of the puzzle is crucial in the endeavour to understand the history of human culture.

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The dialect chain of the Timor-Alor-Pantar language family

Cited by 6 publications

References 67 publications

Understanding through the Numbers: Number Systems, Their Evolution, and Their Perception among Kula People from Alor Island, Southeastern Indonesia

Understanding through the Numbers: Number Systems, Their Evolution, and Their Perception among Kula People from Alor Island, Southeastern Indonesia

Open Problems in Computational Historical Linguistics

Detecting contact in language trees: a Bayesian phylogenetic model with horizontal transfer

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