Using Phylogenetic Algebraic Geometry, we analyze computationally the phylogenetic tree of subfamilies of the Indo-European language family, using data of syntactic structures. The two main sources of syntactic data are the SSWL database and Longobardi’s recent data of syntactic parameters. We compute phylogenetic invariants and likelihood functions for two sets of Germanic languages, a set of ...

The Western fascination with Persia, intensified though it was by the nineteenth century obsession with Indo-European languages, extends back into the classical origins of European culture. As Edward Said notes, Aeschylus' The Persians demonstrates how deeply embedded in the European mind is the belief in Persia's quintessential status as an Oriental society. For many Orientalists Persia demons...

Abstract This paper analyzes and supports the claim that Vedic Sanskrit preserves traces of contrast between Indo-European labiovelars plain velars—a striking archaism in Indo-Iranian family, which otherwise collapsed two velar series. These labiovelar vestiges emerge because pervasive labialization syllabic consonantal rhotics at all attested stages family. Two rhotic environments are examined...

OBJECTIVES The notion that patterns of linguistic and biological variation may cast light on each other and on population histories dates back to Darwin's times; yet, turning this intuition into a proper research program has met with serious methodological difficulties, especially affecting language comparisons. This article takes advantage of two new tools of comparative linguistics: a refined...

Abstract The widespread Uralic family offers several advantages for tracing prehistory: a firm absolute chronological anchor point in an ancient contact episode with well-dated Indo-Iranian; other points of intersection or diagnostic non-intersection early Indo-European (the Late Proto-Indo-European-speaking Yamnaya culture the western steppe, Afanasievo upper Yenisei, and Fatyanovo middle Volg...

One element of the recent controversy over historical methodology set o by Greenberg (1987)'s classi cation of American Indian languages has been his reliance on super cial lexical resemblances, with no attempt to establish phonological correspondences and no evidence from submerged morphology. Proponents of this methodology argue (Greenberg 1949, 1987, 1990, 1991 Ruhlen 1987) that this is the ...

The linguistic characteristics of Oriental languages and Indo-European languages are very different. Using purely length-based algorithm could not produce high performance on aligning texts. This paper investigates the effectiveness of critical part-of-speech (POS) criterion on alignment under conditions of different search strategies and different register texts. Two metrics, recall and precis...

The evolution of languages closely resembles the evolution of haploid organisms. This similarity has been recently exploited [1, 2] to construct language trees. The key point is the definition of a distance among all pairs of languages which is the analogous of a genetic distance. Many methods have been proposed to define these distances, one of this, used by glottochronology, compute distance ...