[{"id":234,"title":"How to Build a Global Tree of All Known Languages? - A Brief Demonstration.","sha":"138279e18ac6c0cb44da84e51e1b37df","user_id":null,"state":"published","body":"[I] (https://unive-paris1.academia.edu/JuliendHuy) used the [Dedius’s binary coding (with MrBayes)] (http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royprsb/suppl/2010/08/27/rspb.2010.1595.DC1/rspb20101595supp1.pdf) of the [WALS dataset] (http://wals.info/), the softwares [Structure 2.3.4]  (http://pritchardlab.stanford.edu/structure.html) (fig.1, see supplementary material), and [StructureHarvester] (http://taylor0.biology.ucla.edu/structureHarvester/) (fig.2) to estimate the most likelihood number (“K”) of founding populations (here, K = 20) needed to explain the structure of the corpus. For each cultural area, the Fst score oscillates between 42–88%, [which is much higher than the genetic variation among human populations] (http://www.pnas.org/content/106/42/17671.short), and suggests that the language families, once established, seem to have been very conservative.  Then I excluded from the corpus each language with more than 30% data which refer to acculturation signal (i.e. less than 70% of single-origin). Indeed, these languages having a complex history, it is expected that they are intermediate between many others and “blur” the phylogenetic signal. Using the altered corpus, I created many trees and networks (fig.3-5), which correctly group, for the first time, all languages into known language families and show evidence for some higher level clusters. The Austronesian language family may not form a monophyletic group.   \r\nThis idea, which has yet to be tested in larger datasets, may be a major step toward a complete understanding of the historical relationship between the world's languages and many other important questions, such as the reconstruction of the human proto-language's structure and its evolution. ","created_at":"2015-09-21T22:04:44.258Z","updated_at":"2016-05-14T05:22:13.934Z","zenodo_id":62024,"doi":"http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.31290","subject":null,"tags":["phylogenetics","language","structure","global tree of all known languages","prehistory","proto-language","comparative method","cultural fst","cultural evolution","linguistic evolution","networks","linguistics","evolutionary anthropology","origin of language","mother tongue","first language","journal of brief ideas"],"vote_count":2,"view_count":1,"score":2.1,"deleted":false,"muted":false,"tweeted":true,"attachment_file_name":"Electronic_supplementary_material.pdf","attachment_content_type":"application/pdf","attachment_file_size":292814,"attachment_updated_at":"2015-09-21T22:04:41.148Z"}]