[Lingtyp] Greenbergian word order universals: confirmed after all

[Guillaume Jacques]

> In linguistics, because of widespread horizontal transfer (hybridization,
> i.e. contact-induced change), the genealogies are typically quite uncertain
> at lower levels – Glottolog has many cases of "rake-like" trees (e.g.
> Southern Bantoid [sout3152] has 9 branches, and Iranic [iran1269] has eight
> branches). So do the methods adopted from computational biology add all
> that much? That isn't clear to me – maybe also because the papers in the
> general-science journals tend to be short and focused on technicalities,
> not on explaining how the new methods relate to earlier methods and why
> they are better in practice (not only in theory).
>

If we infer phylogenies using vocabulary, as opposed to morphology or
structural traits, historical linguists have developed methods to identify
layers of loanwords in a systematic way, and thus this issue can be solved
to a certain degree. Using vocabulary has the advantage that you can then
use this phylogeny to study how structural features evolve without a
serious risk of circularity.

Bayesian phylogenies have many advantages: they don't simply produce one
tree, but a tree distribution, and thus give information on which groupings
are robust and which are less well supported. They are not just a topology:
they can also be used to infer ages, and while in most cases we have large
uncertainty, the results are surprisingly close to the intuition of
historical linguists. We can learn a lot, even from seemingly rake-like
phylogenies.

The consensus trees that are published in the articles on phylogeny is just
the tip of the iceberg of the amount of information you can gain from these
tree distributions, but for now there is no convenient interface to explore
these data, and some knowledge of R or other languages is necessary. This
forthcoming chapter presents a (hopefully) readable introduction to
phylogenies for historical linguists: (99+) The Family Tree model |
Guillaume Jacques and Thomas Pellard - Academia.edu
<https://www.academia.edu/101656989/The_Family_Tree_model>

In the end, what decides the reliability of these studies is the
reliability of cognate coding, which means that historical linguistics
specialized in meticulous etymologies and sound laws will play a crucial
part, and should work collectively to produce better phylogenies, which
typologists can then use to study the distribution of structural features
through time and space.

Guillaume

-- 
Guillaume Jacques

Directeur de recherches
CNRS (CRLAO) - EPHE- INALCO
https://scholar.google.fr/citations?user=1XCp2-oAAAAJ&hl=fr
https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/295
<http://cnrs.academia.edu/GuillaumeJacques>
http://panchr.hypotheses.org/
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