T. Warnow, MATHEMATICAL APPROACHES TO COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United Statesof America, 94(13), 1997, pp. 6585-6590
The inference of the evolutionary history of a set of languages is a c
omplex problem, Although some languages are known to be related throug
h descent from common ancestral languages, for other languages determi
ning whether such a relationship holds is itself a difficult problem.
In this paper we report on new methods, developed by linguists Johanna
Nichols (University of California, Berkeley), Donald Ringe and Ann Ta
ylor (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), and me, for answering
some of the most difficult questions in this domain, These methods an
d the results of the analyses based on these methods were presented in
November 1995 at the Symposium on the Frontiers of Science held by th
e National Academy of Sciences.