In the manner of mathematicians and physicists telling other academic fields how they’re doing it wrong, the computer guys have arrived to tell historical linguists how to study language.
Mainstream historical linguists remain skeptical, however — of computational phylogenetics in general and the new result in particular. The main criticism is that the approach relies mostly on vocabulary and ignores word sounds and structures, such as the stems, prefixes and suffixes that make up a word. And the critics say that word meanings by themselves don’t give enough information to draw firm conclusions, no matter how sophisticated the computation.
A very interesting long piece, well worth your time.
A new look at our linguistic roots knowablemagazine.org
Reader: knowablemagazine.org
