[{"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"},{"id":938,"title":"Problems in Erzya subject-object-conjugation ambiguity","sha":"fc0d9c8d50420092baf48a1b72109203","user_id":null,"state":"published","body":"The Mordvin languages, Erzya and Moksha, are known for their subject and subject-object marking. The cellular structure and usage in the sibling languages diverge. Here, I discribe phenomena in Erzya.\r\nThe subject-object marking in Erzya involves ambiguity and non-ambiguity for 28 non-reflexive relations.\r\nIn the non-past indicatitve, these relations are represented by 15 formatives that can be divided into groups of ten non-ambiguous, 3 two-way ambiguous, and two six-way ambiguous formatives.\r\n\r\nNon-ambiguity comprises pairs of specific singular arguments and singular subjects with third person plural objects.\r\nPlural subjects with third-person objects are two-way ambiguous.\r\nThe remainder comprises two sets of six-way-ambiguous formatives.\r\n\r\nActually, the last set represents seven-way ambiguity, as the third-person-plural form represents an indefinite actor singular or plural. \r\nThus an example:\r\n«Molʲan lučše vastomot karman, štobu kijak avolʲidʲizʲ nʲejtʲ.» 'Better yet, I'll go and meet you[sg], so that nobody[sg] will see you[sg].'\r\nProblem: the indefinite pronoun (kijak[sg] 'anybody') has a plural counterpart (kitʲkak), and yet the non-specific, indefinite singular is referenced in the subject marking as third person plural. There is an overlap of formatives in four cells. \r\nQuestions: Should multiambiguity be seen as default object conjugation marking, and how is the plural indefinite prounoun used?","created_at":"2022-05-02T09:59:53.773Z","updated_at":"2023-09-03T18:11:57.492Z","zenodo_id":6643877,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6643877","subject":null,"tags":["erzya language","uralic languages","verbal conjugation","object marking","ambiguity","finite-state morphology","linguistics"],"vote_count":1,"view_count":1,"score":1.1,"deleted":false,"muted":false,"tweeted":false,"attachment_file_name":null,"attachment_content_type":null,"attachment_file_size":null,"attachment_updated_at":null}]