Measuring Language Divergence by Intra-Lexical Comparison

T. Mark Ellison, Simon Kirby

Abstract: This paper presents a method for building genetic language taxonomies based on a new approach to comparing lexical forms. Instead of comparing forms cross-linguistically, a matrix of language-internal similarities between forms is calculated. These matrices are then compared to give distances between languages. We argue that this coheres better with current thinking in linguistics and psycholinguistics. An implementation of this approach, called PHILOLOGICON, is described, along with its application to Dyen et al.'s (1992) ninety-five wordlists from Indo-European languages.