Description

This book considers how languages have traditionally been divided into families, and asks how they should classified in the future. It describes and applies computer programs from biology and evolutionary genetics to data about languages and shows how the power of the computer can be harnessed to throw light on long-standing problems in historical linguistics. It tests current theories and hypotheses, shows how new ideas can be formulated, and offers a series of demonstrations that the new techniques applied to old data can produce convincing results that are sometimes startlingly at odds with accepted wisdom. April and Robert McMahon combine the expertise and perspectives of an historical linguist and a geneticist. They analyse the links between linguistic and population genetics, and consider how far language can be used to discover and understand the histories and interrelations of human populations. They explore the origins and formation of the Indo-European languages and examine less well studied languages in South America. Their book will be of great practical importance to students and researchers in historical and comparative linguistics and will interest all those concerned with the classification and diffusion of languages in fields such as archaeology, genetics, and anthropology. Its approachable style will appeal to general readers seeking to know more about the relationship between linguistic and human history.

Features

• Approachable style
• Reveals startling results by applying new techniques to old data
• Deals with a wide range of languages, including Indo-European and South American languages
• Authors combine the expertise of historical linguistics and genetics
• Broad disciplinary range including language, genetics, archaeology, computer simulation, quantitative methods
• New perspectives on language contact and language change
• Will be used as a textbook in comparative linguistics

Reviews

"The book is very readable and well written, often slyly humorous, and filled with much good sense. It fills a great need for an introductory survey of numerical methods in language classification. It serves very well as a gentle yet informative introduction to the field, and does so in a very accessible way that makes it a good read for the general linguist, as well as for anyoen contemplating taking up numerical classification in the future." --Anthropological Linguistics

Product Details

283 pages; 30 line illus.; ISBN13: 978-0-19-927902-9ISBN10: 0-19-927902-0

About the Author(s)