Category: Linguistics

Dialects in Tweets

A recent study published in the proceedings of the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing Conference (EMNLP) in October and presented in the LSA conference last week found evidence of geographical lexical variation in Twitter posts. (For news stories on it, see here and here.) Eisenstein, O’Connor, Smith and Xing took a batch of Twitter posts from a corpus released of 15% of all posts during a week in March. In total, they kept 4.7 million tokens from 380,000 messages by 9,500 users, all geotagged from within the continental US. They cut out messages from over-active users, taking only messages from users with less than a thousand followers and followees (However, the average author published around 40~ posts per day, which might be seen by some as excessive. They also only took messages from iPhones and BlackBerries, which have the geotagging function. Eventually, they ended up with just over 5,000 words, of which a quarter did not appear in the spell-checking lexicon aspell.

The Generative Model

In order to figure out lexical variation accurately, both topic and geographical regions had to be ascertained. To do this, they used a generative model (seen above) that jointly figured these in. Generative models work on the assumption that text is the output of a stochastic process that can be analysed statistically. By looking at mass amounts of texts, they were able to infer the topics that are being talked about. Basically, I could be thinking of a few topics – dinner, food, eating out. If I am in SF, it is likely that I may end up using the word taco in my tweet, based on those topics. What the model does is take those topics and figure from them which words are chosen, while at the same time figuring in the spatial region of the author. This way, lexical variation is easier to place accurately, whereas before discourse topic would have significantly skewed the results (the median error drops from 650 to 500 km, which isn’t that bad, all in all.)

ResearchBlogging.orgThe way it works (in summary and quoting the slide show presented at the LSA annual meeting, since I’m not entirely sure on the details) is that, in order to add a topic, several things must be done. For each author, the model a) picks a region from P( r | ∂ ) b) picks a location from P( y | lambda, v ) and c) picks a distribution over P( Theta | alpha ). For each token, it must a) pick a topic from P( z | Theta ), and then b) pick a word from P( w | nu ). Or something like that (sorry). For more, feel free to download the paper on Eisenstien’s website.

This post was chosen as an Editor's Selection for ResearchBlogging.orgWell, what did they find? Basically, Twitter posts do show massive variation based on region. There are geographically-specific proper names, of course, and topics of local prominence, like taco in LA and cab in NY. There’s also variation in foreign language words, with pues in LA but papi in SF. More interestingly, however, there is a major difference in regional slang. ‘uu’, for instance, is pretty much exclusively on the Eastern seaboard, while ‘you’ is stretched across the nation (with ‘yu’ being only slightly smaller.) ‘suttin’ for something is used only in NY, as is ‘deadass’ (meaning very) and, on and even smaller scale, ‘odee’, while ‘af’ is used for very in the Southwest, and ‘hella’ is used in most of the Western states.

Dialectical variation for 'very'

More importantly, though, the study shows that we can separate geographical and topical variation, as well as discover geographical variation from text instead of relying solely on geotagging, using this model. Future work from the authors is hoped to cover differences between spoken variation and variation in digital media. And I, for one, think that’s #deadass cool.

Jacob Eisenstein, Brendan O’Connor, Noah A. Smith, & Eric P. Xing (2010). A Latent Variable Model for Geographic Lexical Variation. Proceedings of EMNLP

Recursion: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?

Hello Hello and Happy New Year,

So a new article appeared on the internet late last year by Coolidge, Overmann and Wynn (2010) (hereafter referred to as COW because it makes me smile). It’s a really short sweet little paper and you should read it as recursion is perhaps one of the hottest topics around language evolution. This generally stems from Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch’s (HCF, 2002) claim that it is the only feature of language unique to humans. I thought it would be useful to outline some of the issues surrounding it as put forward by the COW paper due to its high-profile, controversial and important position within current issues in language evolution.

History

Recursion was first talked about within the field of linguistics by Bar-Hillel in 1953. This was before Chomsky included the concept in his Generative Grammar in 1956.

It wasn’t until 2002 that HCF made the claim that recursion was the only feature of language which was included in the faculty of language in the narrow sense (FLN) and was therefore unique to humans.

Definition

The article outlines two definitions of recursion (within linguistics):

(1) embeddedness of phrases within other phrases, which entails keeping track of long-distance dependencies among phrases

(2) the specification of the computed output string itself, including meta-recursion, where recursion is both the recipe for an utterance and the overarching process that creates and executes the recipe

I always worry when there is more than one definition for a thing because this often results in people talking past eachother or getting confused within their own arguments. These definition are also important to define before one starts making claims about whether recursion is present in species outside of humans or what people are talking about when referring to the evolution of recursion.

Evolutionary Scenarios

The paper also outlines two evolutionary scenarios for the adaptive value of recursion in human language.

(1) The gradualist position posits precursors, such as animal communication and protolanguages, and holds that the selective purpose of recursion was for communication.

(2) The saltationist position assumes no gradual development of recursion and posits that it evolved for reasons other than communication

The latter of these is the stand point taken by the HCF paper. Reasons for recursion evolving if one discounts communication could include the increase of working memory for other reasons or spacial navigation.

Pinker and Jackendoff (2005) argue that since recursion only exists in language to express recursive thoughts it must have pre-existed language.

COW (2010) points out that this is all very well but the question remains of what are recursive thoughts and why are they adaptive? These recursive acts may exist for the purposes of diplomatic speech, perlocutionary acts or for prospective memory and cognition (these are discussed at greater length in COW). These assume that the adaptive force was a social one which before Pinker and Jackendoff was not considered because recursion is often understood away from the social context of speech acts in the realm of mathematics.

Unique to Humans?

An often cited example debunking recursion’s importance to human language is the Piraha tribe who apparently do not have it (Everett 2005). The data from Everett is anecdotal, from one source and sketchy. Even if one was to accept the claims of lack of recursion they can be attributed to other factors such as cultural constraints or (although I think this is going a bit far, but then Bickerton always does go a bit too far) claiming the Piraha tribe have an underlying neurophysiological deficiency such as a limited working memory capacity or an extreme case of acquisitional delay.

COW then covers several animal studies which claim that recursion is present in animals including starlings and various monkeys. These are subject to the claim that the ability to acquire a phrase structure grammar means the presence of recursive ability (which is bollocks). These studies also fall short when one considers that starling’s songs are used to communicate emotional states, not recursive thoughts.

References

Bar-Hillel Y. (1953) On recursive definitions in empirical science. Proceedings of the 11th International Congress of Philosophy, Brussels. 1953, 5:160–165.

Coolidge, F., Overmann, K., & Wynn, T. (2010). Recursion: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science DOI: 10.1002/wcs.131

Hauser MD, Chomsky, N, Fitch (2002) The faculty of language: what is it, who has it and how did it evolve? Science, 298:1569-1579

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~wtsf/downloads/HCF2002.pdf

Top-down vs bottom-up approaches to cognition: Griffiths vs McClelland

There is a battle about to commence.  A battle in the world of cognitive modelling.  Or at least a bit of a skirmish.  Two articles to be published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences debate the merits of approaching cognition from different ends of the microscope.

Structured Probabilistic Thingamy

On the side of probabilistic modelling we have Thom Griffiths, Nick Chater, Charles Kemp, Amy Perfors and Joshua Tenenbaum.  Representing (perhaps non-symbolically) emergentist approaches are James McClelland, Matthew Botvinick, David Noelle, David Plaut, Timothy Rogers, Mark Seidenberg and Linda B. Smith.  This contest is not short of heavyweights.

However, the first battleground seems to be who can come up with the most complicated diagram.  I leave this decision to the reader (see first two images).

The central issue is which approach is the most productive for explaining phenomena in cognition.  David Marr’s levels of explanation include the ‘computational’ characterisation of the problem, an ‘algorithmic’ description of the problem and an ‘implementational’ explanation which focusses on how the task is actually implemented by real brains.  Structured probabilistic takes a ‘top-down’ approach while Emergentism takes a ‘bottom-up’ approach.

Continue reading “Top-down vs bottom-up approaches to cognition: Griffiths vs McClelland”

Fungus, -i. 2nd Decl. N. Masculine – or is it?: On Gender

ResearchBlogging.orgIn an attempt to write out my thoughts for others instead of continually building them up in saved stickies, folders full of .pdfs, and hastily scribbled lecture notes, as if waiting for the spontaneous incarnation of what looks increasingly like a dissertation, I’m going to give a glimpse today of what I’ve been looking into recently. (Full disclosure: I am not a biologist, and was told specifically by my High School teacher that it would be best if I didn’t do another science class. Also, I liked Latin too much, which explains the title.)

It all started, really, with trying to get my flatmate Jamie into research blogging. His intended career path is mycology, where there are apparently fewer posts available for graduate study than in Old English syntax. As he was setting up the since-neglected Fungi Imperfecti, he pointed this article out to me: A Fungus Walks Into A Singles Bar. The post explains briefly how fungi have a very complicated sexual reproduction system.

Fungi are eukaryotes, the same as all other complex organisms with complicated cell structures. However, they are in their own kingdom, for a variety of reasons. Fungi are not the same as mushrooms, which are only the fruiting bodies of certain fungi. Their reproductive mechanisms is rather unexpectedly complex, in that the normal conventions of sex do not apply. Not all fungi reproduce sexually, and many are isogamous, meaning that their gametes look the same and differ only in certain alleles in certain areas called mating-type regions. Some fungi only have two mating types, which would give the illusion of being like animal genders. However, others, like Schizophyllum commune, have over ten thousand (although these interact in an odd way, such that they’re only productive if the mating regions are highly compatible (Uyenoyama 2005)).

Some fungi are homothallic, meaning that self-mating and reproduction is possible. This means that a spore has within it two dissimilar nuclei, ready to mate – the button mushroom apparently does this (yes, the kind you buy in a supermarket.) Heterothallic fungi, on the other hand, merely needs to find another fungi that isn’t the same mating type – which is pretty easy, if there are hundreds of options. Other types of fungi can’t reproduce together, but can vegetatively blend together to share resources, interestingly enough. Think of mind-melding, like Spock. Alternatively, think of mycelia fusing together to share resources.

In short, the system is ridiculously confusing, and not at all like the simple bipolar genders of, say, humans (if we take the canonical view of human gender, meaning only two.) I’m still trying to find adequate research on the origins of this sort of system. Understandably, it’s difficult. Mycologists agree:

“The molecular genetical studies of the past ten years have revealed a genetic fluidity in fungi that could never have been imagined. Transposons and other mobile elements can switch the mating types of fungi and cause chromosonal rearrangements.Deletions of mitochondrial genes can accumulate as either symptomless plasmids or as disruptive elements leading to cellular senescence…[in summary,] many aspects of the genetic fluidity of fungi remain to be resolved, and probably many more remain to be discovered.” (Deacon, 1997: pg. 157)

At this point you’re probably asking why I’ve posted this here. Well, perhaps understandably, I started drawing comparisons between mycologic mating types and linguistic agreement immediately. First, mating-type isn’t limited to bipolarity – neither is grammatical gender. Nearly 10% of the 257 languages noted for number of genders on WALS have more than five genders. Ngan’gityemerri seems to be winning, with 15 different genders (Reid, 1997). Gender distinctions generally have to do with a semantic core – one which need not be based on sex, either, but can cover categories like animacy. Gender can normally be diagnosed by agreement marking, which, taking out genetic analysis of the parent, could be analogic to fungi offspring. Gender can be a fluid system, susceptible to decay, mostly through attrition, but also to reformation and realignment – the same is true of mating types. (For more, see Corbett, 1991)

As with all biologic to linguistic analogues, the connections are a bit tenuous. I’ve been researching fungal replication partly for the sake of dispelling the old “that’s too complex to have evolved” argument, which is probably the most fun point to argue against creationists with. However, I’ve mostly been doing this because fungi and linguistic gender distinctions are just so damn interesting.

If anyone likes, I’ll keep you updated on mycologic evolution and the linguistic analogues I can tentatively draw. For now, though, I’ve really got to get back to studying for my examination in two days. Which means I’ve got to stop thinking about a future post involving detailing why “Prokaryotic evolution and the tree of life are two different things” (Baptiste et al., 2009)…

References:

  • Corbett, G. Gender. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 1991.
  • Deacon, JW. Modern Mycology. Blackwell Science, Oxford: 1997.
  • Reid, Nicholas. and Harvey, Mark David,  Nominal classification in aboriginal Australia / edited by Mark Harvey, Nicholas Reid John Benjamins Pub., Philadelphia, PA :  1997.

Uyenoyama, M. (2004). Evolution under tight linkage to mating type New Phytologist, 165 (1), 63-70 DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8137.2004.01246.x
Bapteste E, O’Malley MA, Beiko RG, Ereshefsky M, Gogarten JP, Franklin-Hall L, Lapointe FJ, Dupré J, Dagan T, Boucher Y, & Martin W (2009). Prokaryotic evolution and the tree of life are two different things. Biology direct, 4 PMID: 19788731

From Natyural to Nacheruhl: Utterance Selection and Language Change

Most of us should know by now that language changes. It’s why the 14th Century prose of Geoffrey Chaucer is nearly impenetrable to modern day speakers of English. It is also why Benjamin Franklin’s phonetically transcribed pronunciation of the English word natural sounded like natyural (phonetically [nætjuɹəl]) rather than our modern variant with a ch sound (phonetically [nætʃəɹəl]). However, it is often taken for granted on this blog that language change can be understood as an evolutionary process. Many people might not see the utility of such thinking outside the realm of biology. That is, evolutionary theory is strictly the preserve of describing biological change, and is less useful as a generalisable concept. A relatively recent group of papers, however, have taken the conceptual machinery of evolutionary theory (see Hull, 2001) and applied it to language.

It's all natyural, yo!

Broadly speaking, these utterance selection models highlight that language change occurs across two steps, each corresponding to an evolutionary process: (1) the production of an utterance, and (2) the propagation of linguistic variants within a speech community. The first of these, the production of an utterance, takes place across an extremely short timescale: we will replicate particular sounds, words, and constructions millions of times across our production lifetime. It is as this step where variation is generated: phonetic variation, for instance, is not only generated through different speakers having different phonetic values for a single phoneme — the same speaker will produce different phonetic values for a single phoneme based on the context. Through variation comes the possibility of selection within a speech community. This leads us to our second timescale, which sees the selection and propagation of these variants — a process that may “take many generations of the replication of the word, which may–or may not–extend beyond the lifetime of an individual speaker.” (Croft, in press).

Recent mathematical work in this area has highlighted four selection mechanisms: replicator selection, neutral evolution, neutral interactor selection, and weighted interactor selection. I’ll now provide a brief overview of each of these mechanisms in relation to language change.

Continue reading “From Natyural to Nacheruhl: Utterance Selection and Language Change”

Cultural and linguistic diversity: evolutionary approaches

Via HENRY:

There’s a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society out on the theme of Cultural and linguistic diversity: evolutionary approaches.

From the introduction:

Evolutionary approaches to cultural change are increasingly influential, and many scientists believe that a ‘grand synthesis’ is now in sight. The papers in this Theme Issue, which derives from a sym- posium held by the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity (University College London) in December 2008, focus on how the phylogenetic tree-building and network-based tech- niques used to estimate descent relationships in biology can be adapted to reconstruct cultural histories, where some degree of inter-societal diffusion will almost inevitably be superimposed on any deeper signal of a historical branching process.

Papers:

  • On the shape and fabric of human history – Russell D. Gray, David Bryant, and Simon J. Greenhill

    • Twitter Evolution: Converging Mechanisms in birdsong and human speech

    In my last post, I made reference to the similarities between birdsong and human speech, and how the development of these two might inform us on the evolution of language. So, it comes as a pleasant surprise that there is a new review in Nature Neuroscience on the very topic: Twitter Evolution: converging mechanisms in birdsong and human speech (click here for paper). I haven’t yet had chance to fully read the paper, but I think the following figure is quite instructive of the connective complexity we’re dealing with:

    On Phylogenic Analogues

    A recent post by Miko on Kirschner and Gerhart’s work on developmental constraints and the implications for evolutionary biology caught my eye due to the possible analogues which could be drawn with language in mind. It starts by saying that developmental constraints are the most intuitive out of all of the known constraints on phenotypic variation.  Essentially, whatever evolves must evolve from the starting point, and it cannot ignore the features of the original. Thus, a winged horse would not occur, as six limbs would violate the basic bauplan of tetrapods. In the same way, a daughter language cannot evolve without taking into account the language it derives from and language universals. But instead of viewing this as a constraint which limits the massive variation we see biologically or linguistically between different phenotypes, developmental constraints can be seen as a catalyst for regular variation.

    ResearchBlogging.orgA recent post by Miko on Kirschner and Gerhart’s work on developmental constraints and the implications for evolutionary biology caught my eye due to the possible analogues which could be drawn with language in mind. It starts by saying that developmental constraints are the most intuitive out of all of the known constraints on phenotypic variation.  Essentially, whatever evolves must evolve from the starting point, and it cannot ignore the features of the original. Thus, a winged horse would not occur, as six limbs would violate the basic bauplan of tetrapods. In the same way, a daughter language cannot evolve without taking into account the language it derives from and language universals. But instead of viewing this as a constraint which limits the massive variation we see biologically or linguistically between different phenotypes, developmental constraints can be seen as a catalyst for regular variation.

    A pretty and random tree showing variation among IE languages.

    Looking back over my courses, I’m surprised by how little I’ve noticed (different from how much was actually said) about reasons for linguistic variation. The modes of change are often noted: <th> is fronted in Fife, for instance, leading to the ‘Firsty Ferret’ instead of the ‘Thirsty Ferret’ as a brew, for instance. However, why the <th> is fronted at all isn’t explained beyond cursory hypothesis. But that’s a bit besides the point: what is the point is that phenotypic variation is not necessarily random, as there are constraints – due to the “buffering and canalizing of development” – which limit variation to a defined range of possibilities. There clearly aren’t any homologues between biological embryonic processes and linguistic constraints, but there are developmental analogues: the input bottleneck (paucity of data) given to children, learnability constraints, the necessity for communication, certain biological constraints to do with production and perception, etc. These all act on language to make variation occur only within certain channels, many of which would be predictable.

    Another interesting point raised by the article is the robustness of living systems to mutation. The buffering effect of embryonic development results in the accumulation of ‘silent’ variation.  This has been termed evolutionary capacitance. Silent variation can lay quiet, accumulating, not changing the phenotype noticeably until environmental or genetic conditions unmask them. I’ve seen little research (not that I don’t expect there to be plenty) on the theoretical implications of the influence of evolutionary capacitance on language change – in other words, how likely a language is to make small variations which don’t affect language understanding before a new language emerges (not that the term language isn’t arbitrary based on the speaking community, anyway). Are some languages more robust than others? Is robustness a quality which makes a language more likely to be used in multilingual settings – for instance, in New Guinea, if seven languages are mutually indistinguishable, is it likely the that local lingua franca is forced by its environment to be more robust in order to maximise comprehension?

    The article goes on about the cost of robustness: stasis. This can be seen clearly in Late Latin, which was more robust than the daughter languages as it was needed to communicate in different environments where the language had branched off into the Romance languages, and an older form was necessary in order for communication to ensue. Thus, Latin retained usage well after the rest of it had evolved into other languages. Another example would be Homeric Greek, which retained many features lost in Attic, Doric, Koine, and other dialects, as it was used in only a certain environment and was therefore resistant to change. This has all been studied before better than I can sum it up here. But the point I am making is that analogues can be clearly drawn here, and some interesting theories regarding language become apparent only when seen in this light.

    A good example, also covered, would be exploratory processes, as Kirschner and Gerhart call them. These are processes which allow for variation to occur in environments where other variables are forced to change. The example given is the growth of bone length, which requires corresponding muscular, circulatory, and other dependant systems to also change. The exploratory processes allow for future change to occur in the other systems. That is, they expedite plasticity. So, for instance, an ad hoc linguistic example would be the loss of a fixed word order, which would require that morphology step in to fill the gap. In such a case, particles or affixes or the like would have to have already paved the way for case markers to evolve, and would have had to have been present to some extent in the original word order system. (This may not be the best example, but I hope my point comes across.)

    Naturally, much of this will have seemed intuitive. But, as Miko stated, these are useful concepts for thinking about evolution; and, in my own case especially, the basics ought to be brought back into scrutiny fairly frequently. Which is justification enough for this post. As always, comments appreciated and accepted. And a possible future post: clade selection as a nonsensical way to approach phylogenic variation.

    References:

    Caldwell, M. (2002). From fins to limbs to fins: Limb evolution in fossil marine reptiles American Journal of Medical Genetics, 112 (3), 236-249 DOI: 10.1002/ajmg.10773

    Gerhart, J., & Kirschner, M. (2007). Colloquium Papers: The theory of facilitated variation Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104 (suppl_1), 8582-8589 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0701035104

    Gerhart, J., & Kirschner, M. (2007). Colloquium Papers: The theory of facilitated variation Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104 (suppl_1), 8582-8589 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0701035104

    Domain-General Regions and Domain-Specific Networks

    The notion of a domain-specific, language acquisition device is something that still divides linguists. Yet, in an ongoing debate spanning at least several decades, there is still no evidence, at least to my knowledge, for the existence of a Universal Grammar. Although, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the problem was solved many years ago, especially if you were to believe the now  sixteen-year old words of Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (1994):

    The extreme specificity of the language system, indeed, is a fact, not just a working hypothesis, even less a heuristically convenient postulation. Doubting that there are language-specific, innate computational capacities today is a bit like being still dubious about the very existence of molecules, in spite of the awesome progress of molecular biology.

    Suffice to say, the analogy between applying scepticism of molecules and scepticism of Universal Grammar is a dud, even if it does turn out that the latter does exist. Why? Well, as stated above: we still don’t know if humans have, or for that matter, even require, an innate ability to process certain grammatical principles. The rationale for thinking that we have some innate capacity for acquiring language can be delineated into a twofold argument: first, children seem adept at rapidly learning a language, even though they aren’t exposed to all of the data; and second, cognitive science told us that our brains are massively modular, or at the very least, should entail some aspect that is domain specific to language (see FLB/FLN distinction in Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch, 2002). I think the first point has been done to death on this blog: cultural evolution can provide an alternative explanation as to how children successfully learn language (see here and here and Smith & Kirby, 2008). What I haven’t really spoken about is the mechanism behind our ability to process language, or to put it differently: how are our brains organised to process language?

    Continue reading “Domain-General Regions and Domain-Specific Networks”

    Mapping Linguistic Phylogeny to Politics

    In a recent article covered in NatureNews in Societes Evolve in Steps, Tom Currie of UCL, and others, like Russell Gray of Auckland, use quantitative analysis of the Polynesian language group to plot socioanthropological movement and power hierarchies in Polynesia. This is based off of previous work, available here, which I saw presented at the Language as an Evolutionary Systemconference last July. The article claims that the means of change for political complexity can be determined using linguistic evidence in Polynesia, along with various migration theories and archaeological evidence.

    I have my doubts.

    Note: Most of the content in this post is refuted wonderfully in the comment section by one of the original authors of the paper. I highly recommend reading the comments, if you’re going to read this at all – that’s where the real meat lies. I’m keeping this post up, finally, because it’s good to make mistakes and learn from them. -Richard

    §§

    I had posted this already on the Edinburgh Language Society blog. I’ve edited it a bit for this blog. I should also state that this is my inaugural post on Replicated Typo; thanks to Wintz’ invitation, I’ll be posting here every now and again. It’s good to be here. Thanks for reading – and thanks for pointing out errors, problems, corrections, and commenting, if you do. Research blogging is relatively new to me, and I relish this unexpected chance to hone my skills and learn from my mistakes. (Who am I, anyway?) But without further ado:

    §

    In a recent article covered in NatureNews in Societes Evolve in Steps, Tom Currie of UCL, and others, like Russell Gray of Auckland, use quantitative analysis of the Polynesian language group to plot socioanthropological movement and power hierarchies in Polynesia. This is based off of previous work, available here, which I saw presented at the Language as an Evolutionary Systemconference last July. The article claims that the means of change for political complexity can be determined using linguistic evidence in Polynesia, along with various migration theories and archaeological evidence.

    I have my doubts. The talk that was given by Russell Gray suggested that there were still various theories about the migratory patterns of the Polynesians – in particular, where they started from. What his work did was to use massive supercomputers to narrow down all of the possibilities, by using lexicons and charting their similarities. The most probable were then recorded, and their statistical probability indicated what was probably the course of action. This, however, is where the ability for guessing ends. Remember, this is massive quantificational statistics. If one has a 70% probability chance of one language being the root of another, that isn’t to say that that language is the root, much less that the organisation of one determines the organisation of another. But statistics are normally unassailable – I only bring up this disclaimer because there isn’t always clear mapping between language usage and migration.

    Continue reading “Mapping Linguistic Phylogeny to Politics”