Bayesian phylogenetic dating of language families

Assembled from 32 blocks · 3 evidence · 34 related

1. Story
2. The application of the computational machinery built for evolutionary biology to cognate data, and since 2003 the most productive and most contested source of absolute dates in historical linguistics. The input is a matrix of cognate judgements over basic vocabulary, produced by ordinary comparative work; the model treats cognate gain and loss as a stochastic process along the branches of an unknown tree, allows rates to vary between branches, and uses historically attested languages and dated extinctions as calibration points. The output is not a single tree but a posterior distribution over trees and dates, which is a genuine methodological advance: uncertainty is reported rather than hidden. The objections are equally genuine. Results are sensitive to the cognate coding, to which languages are sampled, to the calibration priors, and to whether borrowing is modelled at all — and comparative linguists have repeatedly shown that changing defensible inputs moves the headline date by millennia. The technique is best read as a way of testing whether a proposed history is compatible with the lexical data, rather than as an instrument that measures the age of a family.
3. Knowledge
4. The comparative method
5. Glottochronology
6. Bayesian phylogenetic dating of language families
7. Connections
8. The comparative method
9. Glottochronology
10. A language tree is tested against a settlement chronology
11. A Bayesian phylogeny dates Indo-European to the Anatolian Neolithic
12. Phylogeography puts the Indo-European homeland in Anatolia
13. A hybrid model is proposed for the Indo-European origin
14. A dated phylogeny puts Sino-Tibetan at roughly seven thousand years
15. A second phylogeny puts the same family at roughly six thousand years
16. Language death
17. Contact, borrowing and the limits of resemblance
18. The regularity of sound change
19. Bayesian phylogenetic dating of language families
20. Sino-Tibetan
21. Afroasiatic
22. Proto-Indo-European
23. Sir William Jones
24. The Neogrammarian doctrine: sound laws admit no exception
25. Glottochronology proposes to date language splits arithmetically
26. Language in the Americas, and its rejection
27. Bayesian phylogenetic dating of language families
28. Glottochronology proposes to date language splits arithmetically
29. Evidence
30. Supports the reported Bayesian root-age estimate for Indo-European of roughly eight to ten thousand years and its use in favour of the Anatolian hypothesis. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. The age is given as a range from standing knowledge of the reported result; the paper's own credible interval is not quoted, and the page range is omitted rather than guessed.
31. Supports the reported phylogeographic inference of an Anatolian origin for Indo-European, and is cited here together with the criticism it attracted rather than as a settled result. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. Volume number from standing knowledge; page range omitted rather than guessed.
32. Supports the existence of a recent hybrid proposal placing the Indo-European root earlier than the steppe hypothesis allows and south of the Caucasus, with a secondary steppe role in the European dispersal. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. The root age reported by the paper is deliberately not quoted; the summary of its conclusion is held from standing knowledge and its reception since publication could not be assessed as of August 2026.