Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
doi:10.22028/D291-32034
Title: | Investigating diachronic trends in phonological inventories using BDPROTO |
Author(s): | Moran, Steven Grossman, Eitan Verkerk, Annemarie |
Language: | English |
Title: | Language Resources and Evaluation |
Volume: | 2020 |
Publisher/Platform: | Springer Nature |
Year of Publication: | 2020 |
Free key words: | Historical linguistics Language evolution Phylogenetics Phonological inventories |
DDC notations: | 400 Language, linguistics |
Publikation type: | Journal Article |
Abstract: | Here we present an expanded version of BDPROTO, a database comprising phonological inventory data from 257 ancient and reconstructed languages. These data were extracted from historical linguistic reconstructions and brought together into a single unified, normalized, accessible, and Unicode-compliant language resource. This dataset is publicly available and we aim to engage language scientists doing research on language change and language evolution. Furthermore, we identify a hitherto undiscussed temporal bias that complicates the simple compar- ison of ancient and reconstructed languages with present-day languages. Due to the sparsity of the data and the absence of statistical and computational methods that can adequately handle this bias, we instead directly target rates of change within and across families, thereby providing a case study to highlight BDPROTO’s research viability; using phylogenetic comparative methods and high-resolution language family trees, we investigate whether consonantal and vocalic systems differ in their rates of change over the last 10,000 years. In light of the compilation of BDPROTO and the findings of our case study, we discuss the challenges involved in comparing the sound systems of reconstructed languages with modern day languages. |
DOI of the first publication: | 10.1007/s10579-019-09483-3 |
Link to this record: | urn:nbn:de:bsz:291--ds-320343 hdl:20.500.11880/29633 http://dx.doi.org/10.22028/D291-32034 |
ISSN: | 1574-0218 |
Date of registration: | 4-Sep-2020 |
Faculty: | P - Philosophische Fakultät |
Department: | P - Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachtechnologie |
Professorship: | P - Keiner Professur zugeordnet |
Collections: | SciDok - Der Wissenschaftsserver der Universität des Saarlandes |
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Moran2020_Article_InvestigatingDiachronicTrendsI.pdf | Investigating diachronic trends in phonological inventories using BDPROTO | 921,2 kB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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