lexico-statistics

[Larry Trask]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Well, no one else has replied to this, so I'll have a go.

On Mon, 14 Dec 1998, Paul Llido wrote:

> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> Where may I get a reading list on lexico-statistics? I was
> introduced to it through SWADESH. Was SWADESH's list of universal words
> supported by research?

There is probably a lot more published work on glottochronology than on
lexicostatistics per se.  Moreover, some people use the two terms
interchangeably, which I consider unfortunate: gc has a time element,
while ls does not.

First, Swadesh's own work.  The following book contains a complete
bibliography of Swadesh's published (and unpublished) work:

Morris Swadesh. 1971. The Origin and Diversification of Language. Joel
Sherzer (ed.) London: Routledge.

Swadesh's publications on the topic began in 1950, I think, and you can
follow his thinking through a series of publications.

The classic article is this:

Sarah C. Gudschinsky. 1956. `The ABCs of lexicostatistics
(glottochronology)'. Word 12: 175-220.

Discussion and references can be found in the following book:

Sheila Embleton. 1986. Statistics in Historical Linguistics. Bochum:
Brockmeyer.

There are two recent encyclopedia articles which summarize the topic and
present some of the most important references (sorry; I have stupidly
lost the volume numbers):

Sheila Embleton. 1992. `Historical linguistics: mathematical concepts'.
In William Bright (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, vol.
damn, pp. 131-135, Oxford: Oxford.

William S.-Y. Wang. 1994. `Glottochronology, lexicostatistics, and other
numerical methods'. In R. E. Asher and J. M. Y. Simpson (eds),
Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, vol. damn, pp. 1445-1450,
Oxford: Pergamon.

As for the universal validity of Swadesh's lists, this has been very
severely questioned on a number of grounds.  People continue to use
Swadesh's lists, since no other list appears to have a better claim to
universality, but specialists in particular families or areas have
sometimes drawn up their own lists.  For example, somebody (I forget
who) has drawn up a list of words appropriate for working with in
southeast Asia.


Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk