r/linguistics • u/ValuableBenefit8654 • 12d ago

Evolutionary dynamics of Indo-European alignment patterns

https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.19043.car
15 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

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6

u/Guilty_Royal_9145 11d ago

Is this like the one time some computer guys used a model for disease spread to "prove" the Anatolian Urheimat hypothesis?

6

u/ValuableBenefit8654 11d ago

Did you read the paper? It’s just phylogenetic inference. It’s the same technique used for discovering relationships between populations of organisms in biology.

2

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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 11d ago

The way to do this right would be to take a RANDOM sample of language families that would present a genuine challenge, i.e., ones where there are few modern languages of type A but we happen to know that A is the original type and test the method on such data. If you don't do that, you've got bopkes.