Abstract
Phylogenetics is a sub-field of historical linguistics whose aim is to classify a group of languages by considering their distances within a rooted tree that stands for their historical evolution. A few European languages do not belong to the Indo-European family or are otherwise isolated in the European rooted tree. Although it is not possible to establish phylogenetic links using basic strategies, it is possible to calculate the distances between these isolated languages and the rest using simple corpus-based techniques and natural language processing methods. The objective of this article is to select some isolated languages and measure the distance between them and from the other European languages, so as to shed light on the linguistic distances and proximities of these controversial languages without considering phylogenetic issues. The experiments were carried out with 40 European languages including six languages that are isolated in their corresponding families: Albanian, Armenian, Basque, Georgian, Greek, and Hungarian.
Highlights
The aim of computational linguistic phylogenetics is to estimate evolutionary histories of languages, which are usually represented in the form of a tree where the root stands for the common ancestor of its daughter languages, which are the leaves [1]
The six isolated languages follow a different pattern of behavior than that shown in the clustering process
It is important to emphasize that there are at least two patterns that have emerged in the previous clustering experiment: Albanian and Greek are close to Baltic languages, and Basque and Georgian are again very close to each other
Summary
The aim of computational linguistic phylogenetics is to estimate evolutionary histories of languages, which are usually represented in the form of a tree where the root stands for the common ancestor of its daughter languages, which are the leaves [1]. The lexicostatistic method, developed by Morris Swadesh in the 1950s [2], requires defining a standard list of concepts, determine whether the corresponding words are written in similar form (whether they are cognate or not), compute the ratio of cognates shared by each pair of languages giving rise to a similarity matrix, and generate a graphic (usually a tree) on the basis of this matrix [3]. Such a strategy had a strong impact on phylogenetics and historical linguistics
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