1. Slow rate of lexical replacement and deeper genetic relationships
Jean-Marie Hombert
Rebecca Grollemund
Gérard Philippson
Berlin, Feb 22, 2010

2. Speed of lexical replacement
20% of change in basic vocabulary/1000 years
Percentages of cognates
After years : 64%
After years : 41%
After years : 1%
Very little hope for detecting deep linguistic relationships between 2 languages

3. Stability of lexical items
Variable rate of change
Use of basic vocabulary
Variable rate of change in basic vocabulary
See Pagel (2000) in Time depth in Historical Linguistics ( ) Renfrew, MacMahon and Trask : distribution of word rates rather than single rate. This distribution has a long tail (ie very slowly evolving words)

5. Resistant lexical items
IE : 87 languages, Swadesh 200 wordlist
One to 46 cognates/meaning
Slow changing items : five, I, one, two, who
Frequency play a major role : frequently used words evolve at slower rates
Pagel, Atkinson and Meade (2007), Nature
See Pagel, Atkinson and Meade (2007), Nature
Direct estimates of rates of cognate replacement on linguistic phylogenies (family trees) of IE and Bantu languages using a statistical model of word evolution in a bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) framework. Rates of cognate replacement for diffrent meanings in IE were correlated with their paired meanings in Bantu (voir Pagel and Meade in Phylogenetic methods.. Ed by Clackson, Forster and Renfrew (2006)

6. From Pagel et al (2007) Nature; Swadesh 200 word list
From Pagel et al (2007) Nature; Swadesh 200 word list. Conjunctions (grey), prepositions (turquoise), adjectives (red), verbs (blue), nouns (green), special adverbs (yellow), pronouns (orange), numbers (purple)

7. Rank
Item
Category 1
FIVE
Number I
Pronoun
THREE
TWO
WHO 6
FOUR
ONE WE 9
HOW
Adv. 10
NAME
Noun
TONGUE 12
NEW
Adj.
WHAT 14
EAR
NIGHT
THOU 17
TO GIVE
Verb
NOT
STAR
TOOTH (FRONT)
WHERE
Rank
Item
Category 22
TO DIE
Verb
EYE
Noun
HAND
SUN
WATER
Adj. 27
FATHER
Pronoun 28
DAY (NOT NIGHT)
TO LIVE
MOTHER
SALT
WHEN
Adv. 33
FISH HE
TO SIT
SMOKE
SNOW 38
TO DRINK
FOOT IN
Prep.
LONG
LOUSE 43
BONE
Data from Pagel et al Nature 2007; Estimation of rates of lexical evolution of items from Swadesh 200 word list in 87 IE languages. Number of cognates varied from 1 to 46. Calculations show 100 fold ratio. Numbers, Pronouns and special verbs evolve more slowly. Conjounctions, prepositions and adjectives evolve faster.
Numbers are very stable in this list but this is certainly language family specific (IE); then comes pronoms I, we, who..

8. Loanword Typology Project
41 languages, 1460 meanings
Previous studies (Pagel, Holman) were based on Swadesh’s list (ie on a constraint list based on Swadesh’s decision – without any quantitative data to construct the list.
Consequently a study based on a much larger lexicon could allow to « construct » a less biased list

9. From Tadmor, Haspelmath and Taylor « Borrowability and the notion of Basic vocabulary
Nouns are borrowed much more often than verbs and adjectives. Content words are borrowed much more often than function words.
Resistance to borrowability does not correlate very well with Holman’s list of stable items in Swadesh’s list

10. From Tadmor, Haspelmath and Taylor « Borrowability and the notion of Basic vocabulary ».
The Leipzig-Jakarta word list :
This list takes into account not only resitance to borrowability but also the representation rate (existence of meanings having counterparts in the data), analazability (words with complex counterparts) and age of words.
Comparison with Swadesh list : 62 items overlap

11. From Tadmor, Haspelmath and Taylor « Borrowability and the notion of Basic vocabulary ».

12. Major Bantu subdivisions
(from lexico-statistical data,
Bastin and Piron 1999)

13. Bantu languages of Gabon
150 words
Algab project

15. Meaning
Leipzig-Jakarta
Algab
Nb of roots
fire 1 45 6
nose 2 35 5
to go 3
water 4
mouth 22
tongue
bone 7
blood
(root, small) 9
root (big)
2SG pronoun
to come 11
breast 12
(breast, chest)
rain 13
1SG pronoun 14
louse 15
name
wing 17
flesh/meat 18
Meaning
Leipzig-Jakarta
Algab
Nb of roots
arm/hand 19 9 3
night 20 61 8
fly
ear 22
neck 23 45 6
far
to do/make 25
house 26 4
stone/rock 27
tooth 28
to say
bitter
hair 31
one 32
big 35 5
who? 34
3SG pronoun
to hit/beat 36
leg/foot 37 68 10
fish 38 2

16. Conclusion Not convinced… BUT
Need comparable data from different linguistic zones in Africa
Could be interesting for areal studies

17. Thank you

18. Holman et al
(2008)
Item 1.
louse 2.
two 3.
water 4.
ear 5.
die 6. I 7.
liver 8.
eye 9.
hand
10.
hear
11.
tree
12.
fish
13.
name
14.
stone
15.
tooth
16.
breasts
17.
you
18.
path
19.
bone
20.
tongue
Holman et al (2008)
Item
21.
skin
22.
night
23.
leaf
24.
rain
25.
kill
26.
blood
27.
horn
28.
person
29.
knee
30.
one
31.
nose
32.
full
33.
come
34.
star
35.
mountain
36.
fire
37. we
38.
drink
39.
see
40.
bark
41.
new
42.
dog
43.
sun
Holman et al 2008 Rank of Stability of first 40 lexical items from Swadesh list
Stability measured for 100 Swadesh list by considering 245 languages (from 63 different language families)
This study allows us to avoid family specific bias (ie numbers very present in Pagel et al’s list in IE have disappeared here

19. From Holman et al « Explorattions in automated language classification »