Phonetic comparison, varieties, and networks: swadesh’s influence lives on here too

• Jennifer Sullivan ^[1] ; April McMahon ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Edinburgh

     University of Edinburgh

     Reino Unido

     
• Localización: Diachronica: International Journal for Historical Linguistics = Revue Internationale pour la Linguistique Historique = Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Sprachwissenschaft, ISSN 0176-4225, Vol. 27, Nº Extra 2, 2010 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Quantitative Approaches to Linguistic Diversity Commemorating the centenary of the birth of Morris Swadesh ), págs. 325-340
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • While his eponymous basic vocabulary lists and the study of language divergence may be Swadesh’s most appreciated legacies, we demonstrate that phonetic quantification of language varieties also follows very much in the tradition of Swadesh’s own work. We compare a few different measures of phonetic distance on a very small set of data from Germanic varieties, showing the influence of lexicostatistics and the relevance of Swadesh’s ‘Mesh Principle’. What we emphasise overall is that Swadesh’s influence is palpable, even in domains outside those for which he is best remembered.