Comparative linguistics
Encyclopedia
Comparative linguistics (originally comparative philology
) is a branch of historical linguistics
that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical
relatedness.
Genetic relatedness
implies a common origin or proto-language
, and comparative linguistics aims to construct language families
, to reconstruct proto-languages and specify the changes that have resulted in the documented languages. To maintain a clear distinction between attested and reconstructed forms, comparative linguists prefix an asterisk to any form that is not found in surviving texts. A number of methods for carrying out language classification have been developed, ranging from simple inspection to computerised hypothesis testing. Such methods have gone through a long process of development.
. In principle, every difference between two related languages should be explicable to a high degree of plausibility, and systematic changes, for example in phonological or morphological systems, are expected to be highly regular (i.e. consistent). In practice, the comparison may be more restricted, e.g. just to the lexicon. In some methods it may be possible to reconstruct an earlier proto-language. Although the proto-languages reconstructed by the comparative method are hypothetical, a reconstruction may have predictive power. The most notable example of this is Saussure
's proposal that the Indo-European
consonant
system contained laryngeals, a type of consonant attested in no Indo-European language known at the time. The hypothesis was vindicated with the discovery of Hittite
, which proved to have exactly the consonants Saussure had hypothesized in the environments he had predicted.
Where languages are derived from a very distant ancestor, and are thus more distantly related, the comparative method becomes impracticable. In particular, attempting to relate two reconstructed proto-languages by the comparative method has not generally produced results that have met with wide acceptance. The method has also not been very good at unambiguously identifying sub-families and different scholars have produced conflicting results, for example in Indo-European. A number of methods based on statistical analysis of vocabulary have been developed to try and overcome this limitation, such as lexicostatistics
and mass comparison. The former uses lexical cognates like the comparative method but the latter uses only lexical similarity. The theoretical basis of such methods is that vocabulary items can be matched without a detailed language reconstruction and that comparing enough vocabulary items will negate individual inaccuracies. Thus they can be used to determine relatedness but not to determine the proto-language.
uses only a single language, with comparison of word variants, to perform the same function. Internal reconstruction is more resistant to interference but usually has a limited available base of utilizable words and is able to reconstruct only certain changes (those that have left traces as morphophonological variations).
In the twentieth century an alternative method, lexicostatistics
, was developed, which is mainly associated with Morris Swadesh
but is based on earlier work. This uses a short word list of basic vocabulary in the various languages for comparisons. Swadesh used 100 (earlier 200) items that are assumed to be cognate (on the basis of phonetic similarity) in the languages being compared, though other lists have also been used. Distance measures are derived by examination of language pairs but such methods reduce the information. An outgrowth of lexicostatistics is glottochronology
, initially developed in the 1950s, which proposed a mathematical formula for establishing the date when two languages separated, based on percentage of a core vocabulary of culturally independent words. In its simplest form a constant rate of change is assumed, though later versions allow variance but still fail to achieve reliability. Glottochronology has met with mounting scepticism, and is seldom applied today. Dating estimates can now be generated by computerised methods that have less restrictions, calculating rates from the data. However, no mathematical means of producing proto-language split-times on the basis of lexical retention has been proven reliable.
Another controversial method, developed by Joseph Greenberg
, is mass comparison.
The method, which disavows any ability to date developments, aims simply to show which languages are more and less close to each other. Greenberg suggested that the method is useful for preliminary grouping of languages known to be related as a first step towards more in-depth comparative analysis. However, since mass comparison eschews the establishment of regular changes, it is flatly rejected by the majority of historical linguists.
Recently, computerised statistical hypothesis testing methods have been developed which are related to both the comparative method
and lexicostatistics
. Character based methods are similar to the former and distanced based methods are similar to the latter (see Quantitative comparative linguistics
). The characters used can be morphological or grammatical as well as lexical. Since the mid-1990s these more sophisticated tree- and network-based phylogenetic methods have been used to investigate the relationships between languages and to determine approximate dates for proto-languages. These are considered by many to show promise but are not wholly accepted by traditionalists. However, they are not intended to replace older methods but to supplement them. Such statistical methods cannot be used to derive the features of a proto-language, apart from the fact of the existence of shared items of the compared vocabulary. These approaches have been challenged for their methodological problems, since without a reconstruction or at least a detailed list of phonological correspondences there can be no demonstration that two words in different languages are cognate.
by specialists. The most common method applied in pseudoscientific language comparisons is to search two or more languages for words that seem similar in their sound and meaning. While similarities of this kind often seem convincing to laypersons, linguistic scientists consider this kind of comparison to be unreliable for two primary reasons. First, the method applied is not well-defined: the criterion of similarity is subjective and thus not subject to verification or falsification
, which is contrary to the principles of the scientific method. Second, the large size of all languages' vocabulary and a relatively limited inventory of articulated sounds used by most languages make it easy to find coincidentally similar words between languages.
There are sometimes political or religious reasons for associating languages in ways that most linguists would dispute. For example, it has been suggested that the Turanian or Ural–Altaic language group, which relates Sami
and other languages to the Mongolian language
, was used to justify racism
towards the Sami in particular. There are also strong, albeit areal not genetic
, similarities between the Uralic and Altaic languages which provided an innocent basis for this theory. Some believers in Abrahamic religions
try to derive their native languages from Classical Hebrew, as Herbert W. Armstrong
, a proponent of British Israelism
, who said that the word 'British' comes from Hebrew brit meaning 'covenant' and ish meaning 'man', supposedly proving that the British people are the 'covenant people' of God. And Lithuania
n-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas
argued during the mid-1900s that Basque is clearly related to the extinct Pictish
and Etruscan languages, in attempt to show that Basque was a remnant of an "Old European culture". In the Dissertatio de origine gentium Americanarum (1625), the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius
proves that the American Indians speak a language derived from Scandinavian languages (Grotius was on Sweden's payroll), supporting Swedish colonial pretensions in America. Hilaire de Barenton
proved that Turkish is the mother of languages (Sun Language Theory
), in support of Kemal Atatürk's nationalism.
Pride is also a motivation: The Dutch doctor Johannes Goropius Becanus
, in his Orgines Antverpiana (1580) admits Quis est enim qui non amet patriae sermonem (who does not love his fathers' tongue ?), whilst proving that Hebrew is derived from Dutch - a claim considered so ridiculous that Leibniz coined the term "goropism" to mean "absurd etymology". The French Éloi Johanneau claims in 1818 (Mélanges d'origines étymologiques et de questions grammaticales) that the Celtic language is the oldest, and the mother of all others.
Finally, there is pure naivety, or folly: in 1759, Joseph de Guignes proved (Mémoire dans lequel on prouve que les Chinois sont une colonie égyptienne) that Chinese and Egyptian were related. In 1885, Edward Tregear (the Aryan Maori) compared Maori and Aryan languages - they are related, of course. Also related (according to Jean Prat, in his 1941 Les langues Nitales) are the Bantu languages of Africa and Latin. Just like frogs' quacking, which, compared to French, provided - according to Jean-Pierre Brisset
(La Grande Nouvelle, around 1900) irrefutable proof of human descent from the frog, by linguistic means.
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...
) is a branch of historical linguistics
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
relatedness.
Genetic relatedness
Genetic relationship (linguistics)
In linguistics, genetic relationship is the usual term for the relationship which exists between languages that are members of the same language family. The term genealogical relationship is sometimes used to avoid confusion with the unrelated use of the term in biological genetics...
implies a common origin or proto-language
Proto-language
A proto-language in the tree model of historical linguistics is the common ancestor of the languages that form a language family. Occasionally, the German term Ursprache is used instead.Often the proto-language is not known directly...
, and comparative linguistics aims to construct language families
Language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...
, to reconstruct proto-languages and specify the changes that have resulted in the documented languages. To maintain a clear distinction between attested and reconstructed forms, comparative linguists prefix an asterisk to any form that is not found in surviving texts. A number of methods for carrying out language classification have been developed, ranging from simple inspection to computerised hypothesis testing. Such methods have gone through a long process of development.
Methods
The fundamental technique of comparative linguistics is to compare phonological systems, morphological systems, syntax and the lexicon of two or more languages using techniques such as the comparative methodComparative method
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyzes the internal...
. In principle, every difference between two related languages should be explicable to a high degree of plausibility, and systematic changes, for example in phonological or morphological systems, are expected to be highly regular (i.e. consistent). In practice, the comparison may be more restricted, e.g. just to the lexicon. In some methods it may be possible to reconstruct an earlier proto-language. Although the proto-languages reconstructed by the comparative method are hypothetical, a reconstruction may have predictive power. The most notable example of this is Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
's proposal that the Indo-European
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
system contained laryngeals, a type of consonant attested in no Indo-European language known at the time. The hypothesis was vindicated with the discovery of Hittite
Hittite language
Hittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centred on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...
, which proved to have exactly the consonants Saussure had hypothesized in the environments he had predicted.
Where languages are derived from a very distant ancestor, and are thus more distantly related, the comparative method becomes impracticable. In particular, attempting to relate two reconstructed proto-languages by the comparative method has not generally produced results that have met with wide acceptance. The method has also not been very good at unambiguously identifying sub-families and different scholars have produced conflicting results, for example in Indo-European. A number of methods based on statistical analysis of vocabulary have been developed to try and overcome this limitation, such as lexicostatistics
Lexicostatistics
Lexicostatistics is an approach to comparative linguistics that involves quantitative comparison of lexical cognates. Lexicostatistics is related to the comparative method but does not reconstruct a proto-language...
and mass comparison. The former uses lexical cognates like the comparative method but the latter uses only lexical similarity. The theoretical basis of such methods is that vocabulary items can be matched without a detailed language reconstruction and that comparing enough vocabulary items will negate individual inaccuracies. Thus they can be used to determine relatedness but not to determine the proto-language.
History
The earliest method of this type was the comparative method, which was developed over many years, culminating in the nineteenth century. This uses a long word list and detailed study. However, it has been criticized for example as being subjective, being informal and lacking testability. The comparative method uses information from two or more languages and allows reconstruction of the ancestral language. The method of Internal reconstructionInternal reconstruction
Internal reconstruction is a method of recovering information about a language's past from the characteristics of the language at a later date...
uses only a single language, with comparison of word variants, to perform the same function. Internal reconstruction is more resistant to interference but usually has a limited available base of utilizable words and is able to reconstruct only certain changes (those that have left traces as morphophonological variations).
In the twentieth century an alternative method, lexicostatistics
Lexicostatistics
Lexicostatistics is an approach to comparative linguistics that involves quantitative comparison of lexical cognates. Lexicostatistics is related to the comparative method but does not reconstruct a proto-language...
, was developed, which is mainly associated with Morris Swadesh
Morris Swadesh
Morris Swadesh was an influential and controversial American linguist. In his work, he applied basic concepts in historical linguistics to the Indigenous languages of the Americas...
but is based on earlier work. This uses a short word list of basic vocabulary in the various languages for comparisons. Swadesh used 100 (earlier 200) items that are assumed to be cognate (on the basis of phonetic similarity) in the languages being compared, though other lists have also been used. Distance measures are derived by examination of language pairs but such methods reduce the information. An outgrowth of lexicostatistics is glottochronology
Glottochronology
Glottochronology is that part of lexicostatistics dealing with the chronological relationship between languages....
, initially developed in the 1950s, which proposed a mathematical formula for establishing the date when two languages separated, based on percentage of a core vocabulary of culturally independent words. In its simplest form a constant rate of change is assumed, though later versions allow variance but still fail to achieve reliability. Glottochronology has met with mounting scepticism, and is seldom applied today. Dating estimates can now be generated by computerised methods that have less restrictions, calculating rates from the data. However, no mathematical means of producing proto-language split-times on the basis of lexical retention has been proven reliable.
Another controversial method, developed by Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Harold Greenberg was a prominent and controversial American linguist, principally known for his work in two areas, linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.- Early life and career :...
, is mass comparison.
The method, which disavows any ability to date developments, aims simply to show which languages are more and less close to each other. Greenberg suggested that the method is useful for preliminary grouping of languages known to be related as a first step towards more in-depth comparative analysis. However, since mass comparison eschews the establishment of regular changes, it is flatly rejected by the majority of historical linguists.
Recently, computerised statistical hypothesis testing methods have been developed which are related to both the comparative method
Comparative method
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyzes the internal...
and lexicostatistics
Lexicostatistics
Lexicostatistics is an approach to comparative linguistics that involves quantitative comparison of lexical cognates. Lexicostatistics is related to the comparative method but does not reconstruct a proto-language...
. Character based methods are similar to the former and distanced based methods are similar to the latter (see Quantitative comparative linguistics
Quantitative comparative linguistics
Quantitative comparative linguistics is a branch of comparative linguistics that applies mathematical models to the problem of classifying language relatedness. This includes the use of computational phylogenetics and cladistics to define an optimal tree to represent a hypothesis about the...
). The characters used can be morphological or grammatical as well as lexical. Since the mid-1990s these more sophisticated tree- and network-based phylogenetic methods have been used to investigate the relationships between languages and to determine approximate dates for proto-languages. These are considered by many to show promise but are not wholly accepted by traditionalists. However, they are not intended to replace older methods but to supplement them. Such statistical methods cannot be used to derive the features of a proto-language, apart from the fact of the existence of shared items of the compared vocabulary. These approaches have been challenged for their methodological problems, since without a reconstruction or at least a detailed list of phonological correspondences there can be no demonstration that two words in different languages are cognate.
Related fields
There are other branches of linguistics that involve comparing languages, which are not, however, part of comparative linguistics:- Linguistic typologyLinguistic typologyLinguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the common properties and the structural diversity of the world's languages...
compares languages to classify them by their features. Its ultimate aim is to understand the universalLinguistic universalA linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs, or If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels. Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to the study of...
s that govern language, and the range of types found in the world's languages is respect of any particular feature (word order or vowel system, for example). Typological similarity does not imply a historical relationship. However, typological arguments can be used in comparative linguistics: one reconstruction may be preferred to another as typologically more plausible. - Contact linguistics examines the linguistic results of contact between the speakers of different languages, particularly as evidenced in loan words. An empirical study of loans is by definition historical in focus and therefore forms part of the subject matter of historical linguistics. One of the goals of etymologyEtymologyEtymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...
is to establish which items in a language's vocabulary result from linguistic contact. This is also an important issue both for the comparative method and for the lexical comparison methods, since failure to recognize a loan may distort the findings. - Contrastive linguisticsContrastive analysisContrastive analysis is the systematic study of a pair of languages with a view to identifying their structural differences and similarities. Historically it has been used to establish language genealogies....
compares languages usually with the aim of assisting language learning by identifying important differences between the learner's native and target languages. Contrastive linguistics deals solely with present-day languages.
Pseudoscientific language comparison
Whereas comparative linguistics studies the historical relationships of languages using the comparative method to search for regular (i.e. recurring) correspondences between the languages’ phonology, grammar and core vocabulary, and through hypothesis testing, persons with little or no specialization in the field sometimes attempt to establish historical associations between languages by naive postulations of similarities between them, in a way that is considered pseudoscientificPseudoscience
Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status...
by specialists. The most common method applied in pseudoscientific language comparisons is to search two or more languages for words that seem similar in their sound and meaning. While similarities of this kind often seem convincing to laypersons, linguistic scientists consider this kind of comparison to be unreliable for two primary reasons. First, the method applied is not well-defined: the criterion of similarity is subjective and thus not subject to verification or falsification
Falsifiability
Falsifiability or refutability of an assertion, hypothesis or theory is the logical possibility that it can be contradicted by an observation or the outcome of a physical experiment...
, which is contrary to the principles of the scientific method. Second, the large size of all languages' vocabulary and a relatively limited inventory of articulated sounds used by most languages make it easy to find coincidentally similar words between languages.
There are sometimes political or religious reasons for associating languages in ways that most linguists would dispute. For example, it has been suggested that the Turanian or Ural–Altaic language group, which relates Sami
Sami languages
Sami or Saami is a general name for a group of Uralic languages spoken by the Sami people in parts of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden and extreme northwestern Russia, in Northern Europe. Sami is frequently and erroneously believed to be a single language. Several names are used for the Sami...
and other languages to the Mongolian language
Mongolian language
The Mongolian language is the official language of Mongolia and the best-known member of the Mongolic language family. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 5.2 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the Mongolian residents of the Inner...
, was used to justify racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
towards the Sami in particular. There are also strong, albeit areal not genetic
Language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...
, similarities between the Uralic and Altaic languages which provided an innocent basis for this theory. Some believers in Abrahamic religions
Abrahamic religions
Abrahamic religions are the monotheistic faiths emphasizing and tracing their common origin to Abraham or recognizing a spiritual tradition identified with him...
try to derive their native languages from Classical Hebrew, as Herbert W. Armstrong
Herbert W. Armstrong
Herbert W. Armstrong founded the Worldwide Church of God in the late 1930s, as well as Ambassador College in 1946, and was an early pioneer of radio and tele-evangelism, originally taking to the airwaves in the 1930s from Eugene, Oregon...
, a proponent of British Israelism
British Israelism
British Israelism is the belief that people of Western European descent, particularly those in Great Britain, are the direct lineal descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. The concept often includes the belief that the British Royal Family is directly descended from the line of King David...
, who said that the word 'British' comes from Hebrew brit meaning 'covenant' and ish meaning 'man', supposedly proving that the British people are the 'covenant people' of God. And Lithuania
Lithuania
Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...
n-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas
Marija Gimbutas
Marija Gimbutas , was a Lithuanian-American archeologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe", a term she introduced. Her works published between 1946 and 1971 introduced new views by combining traditional spadework with linguistics and mythological...
argued during the mid-1900s that Basque is clearly related to the extinct Pictish
Pictish language
Pictish is a term used for the extinct language or languages thought to have been spoken by the Picts, the people of northern and central Scotland in the Early Middle Ages...
and Etruscan languages, in attempt to show that Basque was a remnant of an "Old European culture". In the Dissertatio de origine gentium Americanarum (1625), the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius
Hugo Grotius
Hugo Grotius , also known as Huig de Groot, Hugo Grocio or Hugo de Groot, was a jurist in the Dutch Republic. With Francisco de Vitoria and Alberico Gentili he laid the foundations for international law, based on natural law...
proves that the American Indians speak a language derived from Scandinavian languages (Grotius was on Sweden's payroll), supporting Swedish colonial pretensions in America. Hilaire de Barenton
Hilaire de Barenton
Hilaire de Barenton , with real name Étienne Boulé, was a friar, historian of the languages of the Middle East. His name is often misspelled as de Baranton.-Biography:...
proved that Turkish is the mother of languages (Sun Language Theory
Sun Language Theory
The Sun Language Theory was a pseudoscientific linguistic hypothesis proposing that all human languages are descendants of one Central Asian primal language. The theory further proposed that the only language remaining more or less the same as this primal language was Turkic...
), in support of Kemal Atatürk's nationalism.
Pride is also a motivation: The Dutch doctor Johannes Goropius Becanus
Johannes Goropius Becanus
Johannes Goropius Becanus was a Dutch physician, linguist, and humanist.-Life:He was born Jan Gerartsen van Gorp in the town of Gorp, situated in the municipality of Hilvarenbeek...
, in his Orgines Antverpiana (1580) admits Quis est enim qui non amet patriae sermonem (who does not love his fathers' tongue ?), whilst proving that Hebrew is derived from Dutch - a claim considered so ridiculous that Leibniz coined the term "goropism" to mean "absurd etymology". The French Éloi Johanneau claims in 1818 (Mélanges d'origines étymologiques et de questions grammaticales) that the Celtic language is the oldest, and the mother of all others.
Finally, there is pure naivety, or folly: in 1759, Joseph de Guignes proved (Mémoire dans lequel on prouve que les Chinois sont une colonie égyptienne) that Chinese and Egyptian were related. In 1885, Edward Tregear (the Aryan Maori) compared Maori and Aryan languages - they are related, of course. Also related (according to Jean Prat, in his 1941 Les langues Nitales) are the Bantu languages of Africa and Latin. Just like frogs' quacking, which, compared to French, provided - according to Jean-Pierre Brisset
Jean-Pierre Brisset
Jean-Pierre Brisset was a French writer.Born in a family of farmers, Brisset was an outsider writer, much like Henri Rousseau was an outsider artist. He is a saint on the 'Pataphysics calendar. His writings are in publication as of 2004.Brisset was an autodidact...
(La Grande Nouvelle, around 1900) irrefutable proof of human descent from the frog, by linguistic means.
See also
- Comparative methodComparative methodIn linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyzes the internal...
- Contrastive analysisContrastive analysisContrastive analysis is the systematic study of a pair of languages with a view to identifying their structural differences and similarities. Historically it has been used to establish language genealogies....
- Contrastive linguisticsContrastive linguisticsContrastive linguistics is a practice-oriented linguistic approach that seeks to describe the differences and similarities between a pair of languages .-History:...
- GlottochronologyGlottochronologyGlottochronology is that part of lexicostatistics dealing with the chronological relationship between languages....
- Historical linguisticsHistorical linguisticsHistorical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
- Intercontinental Dictionary SeriesIntercontinental Dictionary SeriesThe Intercontinental Dictionary Series is a large database of topical vocabulary lists in various world languages. The general editor of the database is Bernard Comrie of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. Mary Ritchie Key of the University of California, Irvine is the...
- LexicostatisticsLexicostatisticsLexicostatistics is an approach to comparative linguistics that involves quantitative comparison of lexical cognates. Lexicostatistics is related to the comparative method but does not reconstruct a proto-language...
- Mass comparison
- Sound law