Glottochronology
node
The mid-twentieth-century attempt, associated above all with Morris Swadesh, to date language splits by assuming that basic vocabulary is replaced at a roughly constant rate. Take a fixed list of core meanings, count how many of them are cognate between two languages, and convert the retention rate into elapsed time with a universal constant calibrated on languages with written histories. The appeal was obvious — it promised absolute dates where the comparative method gives only relative ones — and the method was rapidly and comprehensively criticised. Replacement rates are not constant across meanings, languages or periods; cultural upheaval and contact accelerate them; the constant was calibrated on a handful of Indo-European cases and generalised to the world; and cognacy judgements, which the arithmetic treats as data, are themselves the contested output of prior comparative work. By the 1970s glottochronology was largely abandoned in mainstream historical linguistics. Its underlying question did not go away, and the computational phylogenetic methods that returned in the 2000s address the same problem with explicit models of rate variation — which is why their critics so often reach first for the word glottochronology.
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- Story
- The mid-twentieth-century attempt, associated above all with Morris Swadesh, to date language splits by assuming that basic vocabulary is replaced at a roughly constant rate. Take a fixed list of core meanings, count how many of them are cognate between two languages, and convert the retention rate into elapsed time with a universal constant calibrated on languages with written histories. The appeal was obvious — it promised absolute dates where the comparative method gives only relative ones — and the method was rapidly and comprehensively criticised. Replacement rates are not constant across meanings, languages or periods; cultural upheaval and contact accelerate them; the constant was calibrated on a handful of Indo-European cases and generalised to the world; and cognacy judgements, which the arithmetic treats as data, are themselves the contested output of prior comparative work. By the 1970s glottochronology was largely abandoned in mainstream historical linguistics. Its underlying question did not go away, and the computational phylogenetic methods that returned in the 2000s address the same problem with explicit models of rate variation — which is why their critics so often reach first for the word glottochronology.
- Knowledge
- Glottochronology
- Connections
- Bayesian phylogenetic dating of language families
- Glottochronology proposes to date language splits arithmetically
- Evidence
- Supports the general account in this pack of the comparative method, the regularity principle, contact and borrowing, glottochronology and its critics, and the definition of a language isolate. 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. No chapter or page is cited, because the book was not opened in this session; the citation identifies the work a curator should check the general account against. This is the source named in the Journey declaration.
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