Austronesian Linguistics in the media

[Russell Gray]

Hi, my 2 cents worth is that this is an interesting and technically sophisticated piece of work.  However, note that their algorithm requires a tree as input and that their inferences are still a long way from those of professionally trained linguists.  The algorithm does better than just picking a reflex in an extant language, but not by as much as one might hope.  Cheers, Russell.

Professor Russell Gray, FRSNZ
Deputy Director (Research)
School of Psychology
University of Auckland
Auckland
New Zealand
rd.gray at auckland.ac.nz<mailto:rd.gray at auckland.ac.nz>
64 9 3737 599 ex 88525
http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz/
http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz/crows/
http://pantheon.yale.edu/~clb3/NorthAmericanDialects/
http://scholar.google.co.nz/citations?user=FzE-34YAAAAJ&hl=en





On 13/02/2013, at 9:18 AM, Christopher Sundita <cas536 at cornell.edu<mailto:cas536 at cornell.edu>>
 wrote:

Hello AN-Lang Members,

Austronesian historical linguistics is currently in the news. Was quite a surprise - some of the article headlines made references to the Rosetta Stone or what not. In a nutshell, researchers from the University of British Columbia and UC Berkeley developed a model and algorithm in reconstructing Proto-Austronesian. They used 637 languages in the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database ( http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz/austronesian/ ).

Just some of the articles this was mentioned:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21427896
http://www.nature.com/news/computer-program-roots-out-ancestors-of-modern-tongues-1.12407
http://phys.org/news/2013-02-computerized-rosetta-stone-reconstructs-ancient.html
http://news.yahoo.com/software-revives-dead-tongues-141348127.html

The article itself is available for download at:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/02/05/1204678110.abstract

What are you thoughts on this?

--Chris Sundita

Christopher Sundita
Graduate Student, Linguistics
Cornell University
http://conf.ling.cornell.edu/csundita

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