I'm reading "The Horse, The Wheel, And Language" and came across an interesting tidbit.
It says that the original, simplistic model of glottochronology created by Swadesh had a lot of flaws and failed to give accurate dates for known language "splits", but that later two people named Sankoff and Embleton revived the theory of glottochronology with a more complicated theory that took into account shared borders with other languages, a language similarity index, and a lot of other variables, that now has a great track record.
As a data professional, I immediately felt suspect. I don't know how many data points we have on known dates for language "splits", but even if it's a hundred, introducing even a handful of variables could easily allow one to overfit a model that appears effective without actually having any explanatory power.
What's the story here? The book doesn't go into the details of the new glottochronology approach, and I'd love to learn more.
I'm aware that the method has some problematic assumptions, but my question is simply about some difficulties I'm having with the calculations.
Here is the formula for calculating time depth as I found it in Terry Crowley's Intro to Historical Linguistics:
t (the number of thousands of years since two languages have separated) = log C (C is the percentage of cognates) over 2 log r (r is the rate of change, .805)
Before giving this formula he says that, since 19.5% of core vocabulary changes every 1,000 years "we would expect languages that share approximately 80% of their vocabulary to have diverged somewhere around 1,000 years ago."
However, I can't make the numbers match up. For instance, using that formula, I get 80% cognates after only 514 years, and 64 % cognates after 1,028 years. On the other hand, if 20% of the core vocabulary changes every 1,000 years, it seems like we would have 80% after 1,000 years and 64% after 2,000 years, and so on. Using this latter method, after 10,000 years, 10% would remain. However, using the formula 1% would remain.
What am I missing?
How would someone go about reconstructing sound changes over time? I know the basics from PIE to the sub-branches etc, but imagine I want to deduce a Nostratic cognate by myself... How would I know that the Uralic or say Altaic word is a cognate with the PIE reconstructed root? Thanks everyone!
Among linguists and in general.
I've built a corpus of ~160 nouns across 1480 languages. There's about 10% overlap with a Swadesh list.
If the language has a distinction between singular and plural, I have captured that; if it has a distinction between subject and object I've captured that most of the time.
There's a bit of noise: around 5%-10% of the words are wrong, which I am slowly working out how to clean up.
I'm writing a paper on it at the moment and my supervisor has challenged me to come up with uses for it. I needed it because I was trying to write software that automatically detected pluralisation rules in languages. I'm about to release the data set, so I'm wondering what else it would be used for.
Glottochronology? Language similarity? To what use would you put a big noun corpus in your work?
EDIT: It's ~160 words (sometimes a little less) in each language. The total size of the dataset is 239,156 = source words * languages. If you include multiple forms: 625,351 = source words * languages * grammatical forms.
I don't want to step on anybody's toes here, but the amount of non-dad jokes here in this subreddit really annoys me. First of all, dad jokes CAN be NSFW, it clearly says so in the sub rules. Secondly, it doesn't automatically make it a dad joke if it's from a conversation between you and your child. Most importantly, the jokes that your CHILDREN tell YOU are not dad jokes. The point of a dad joke is that it's so cheesy only a dad who's trying to be funny would make such a joke. That's it. They are stupid plays on words, lame puns and so on. There has to be a clever pun or wordplay for it to be considered a dad joke.
Again, to all the fellow dads, I apologise if I'm sounding too harsh. But I just needed to get it off my chest.
Do your worst!
They were cooked in Greece.
I'm surprised it hasn't decade.
For context I'm a Refuse Driver (Garbage man) & today I was on food waste. After I'd tipped I was checking the wagon for any defects when I spotted a lone pea balanced on the lifts.
I said "hey look, an escaPEA"
No one near me but it didn't half make me laugh for a good hour or so!
Edit: I can't believe how much this has blown up. Thank you everyone I've had a blast reading through the replies π
It really does, I swear!
Don't you know a good pun is its own reword?
Because she wanted to see the task manager.
Heard they've been doing some shady business.
but then I remembered it was ground this morning.
Edit: Thank you guys for the awards, they're much nicer than the cardboard sleeve I've been using and reassures me that my jokes aren't stale
Edit 2: I have already been made aware that Men In Black 3 has told a version of this joke before. If the joke is not new to you, please enjoy any of the single origin puns in the comments
BamBOO!
Theyβre on standbi
A play on words.
My daughter, Chewbecca, not so much.
Pilot on me!!
Christopher Walken
Nothing, he was gladiator.
Or would that be too forward thinking?
Dad jokes are supposed to be jokes you can tell a kid and they will understand it and find it funny.
This sub is mostly just NSFW puns now.
If it needs a NSFW tag it's not a dad joke. There should just be a NSFW puns subreddit for that.
Edit* I'm not replying any longer and turning off notifications but to all those that say "no one cares", there sure are a lot of you arguing about it. Maybe I'm wrong but you people don't need to be rude about it. If you really don't care, don't comment.
What did 0 say to 8 ?
" Nice Belt "
So What did 3 say to 8 ?
" Hey, you two stop making out "
When I got home, they were still there.
I won't be doing that today!
Hindus, on the other hand, never had any beef.
This morning, my 4 year old daughter.
Daughter: I'm hungry
Me: nerves building, smile widening
Me: Hi hungry, I'm dad.
She had no idea what was going on but I finally did it.
Thank you all for listening.
Where ever you left it π€·ββοΈπ€
There hasn't been a post all year!
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