1 Evolutionary trees The evolutionary history of a taxonomic group, both in biology and in linguistics, is usually represented as a tree. Many of the actual trees that one nds in the literature, both biological and linguistic, are controversial for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the evidence from which a tree could be constructed is meager or ambiguous; very often it is \noisy", so that a tree...

Given the increasing interest and development of computational and quantitative methods in historical linguistics, it is important that scholars have a basis for documenting, testing, evaluating, and sharing complex workflows. We present a novel open-source toolkit for quantitative tasks in historical linguistics that offers these features. This toolkit also serves as an interface between exist...

Tibeto-Burman historical linguistics has relied heavily on the spelling of Burmese and Tibetan words as found in standard modern dictionaries, at the expense of the earliest attested records. This examination of the development of the Burmese vowel system, in the light of early Burmese philological data and comparisons to Old Chinese and Old Tibetan, facilitates a refined understanding of Burme...

1. Linguistic Phylogenetic Trees The reconstruction of phylogenetic trees of language families is one of the main problems in Historical Linguistics. In recent years, computational methods have been used, mostly borrowed from similar techniques in mathematical biology, see for instance the collection of papers in [1]. Mostly, the computational reconstructions of linguistic phylogenetic trees fo...

This paper presents an overview of the current state of historical linguistics in Australian languages. Australian languages have been important in theoretical debates about the nature of language change and the possibilities for reconstruction and classification in areas of intensive diffusion. Here are summarized the most important outstanding questions for Australian linguistic prehistory; I...

This work represents an attempt to utilize the computer in solving problems in historical linguistics. The corpus upon which it operates is not a language but a recently published etymological dictionary of Old Cornish. 1 Any observations regarding the scarcity or inaccuracy of the data utilized are, therefore, irrelevant, as far as the present paper is concerned. As the dictionary in question ...

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2 Among the linguistic lineages of Mesoamerica, the Otomanguean family is the most diverse 3 and most widely spread. Long occupying a central position in one of the cradles of human 4 civilization, speakers of Otomanguean languages have played important roles in the region, 5 about which their languages have much to tell. However, Otomanguean is perhaps the least 6 understood of the major Mesoa...