7/27/2019 Short, Frequent Words Are More Likely to Appear Genetically Related by Chance

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Short, frequent words are more likely to appear genetically

related by chance

Kyle Mahowald (/search?author1=Kyle+Mahowald&sortspec=date&submit=Submit) and

Edward Gibson (/search?author1=Edward+Gibson&sortspec=date&submit=Submit)

An important question in historic al linguistics is whether deep genetic relationships exist across language

families. Although specific families can be reconstructed back to around 6,000 y ago, Pagel et al. (1) claim

that seven Eurasian families arose from a common ancestor 15,000 y ago. Pagel et al. develop aphylogenetic model, starting with a subset of the Swadesh basic word list for seven language families in the

Languages of the World Ety mological Database, which lists reconstructed proto-words and cognates.

Because these reconstructions are potentially unreliable, Pagel et al. treat each reconstructed cognate pair

as a binary random variable. They find a robust corr elation

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To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: kylemaho@mit.edu (mailto:kylemaho@mit.edu).

Author Responses

Letter - Biological Sciences - Anthropology:

Paul Heggarty

Ultraconserved words and Eurasiatic? The faces in the fire of language prehistory

PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) 2013 110 (35) E3254; published ahead of print

August 5, 2013, doi:10.1073/pnas.1309114110

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Letter - Biological Sciences - Anthropology:

Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude, and Andrew Meade

Reply to Mahowald and Gibson and to Heggarty: No problems with short words, and no evidence

provided

PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) 2013 110 (35) E3255; published ahead of printAugust 5, 2013, doi:10.1073/pnas.1309838110

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Related Article

Biological Sciences - Anthropology:

Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude, and Andrew Meade

Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia

PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) 2013 110 (21) 8471-8476; published ahead of

print May 6, 2013, doi:10.1073/pnas.1218726110

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