Språkbanken, Department of Swedish Language, Göteborg, Sweden.
PLoS One. 2013 May 17;8(5):e63238. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0063238. Print 2013.
The ASJP (Automated Similarity Judgment Program) described an automated, lexical similarity-based method for dating the world's language groups using 52 archaeological, epigraphic and historical calibration date points. The present paper describes a new automated dating method, based on phonotactic diversity. Unlike ASJP, our method does not require any information on the internal classification of a language group. Also, the method can use all the available word lists for a language and its dialects eschewing the debate on 'language' vs. 'dialect'. We further combine these dates and provide a new baseline which, to our knowledge, is the best one. We make a systematic comparison of our method, ASJP's dating procedure, and combined dates. We predict time depths for world's language families and sub-families using this new baseline. Finally, we explain our results in the model of language change given by Nettle.
ASJP（自动相似度判断程序）描述了一种自动化的、基于词汇相似度的方法，用于使用 52 个考古、铭刻和历史校准日期点来确定世界语言群体的年代。本文描述了一种新的自动年代测定方法，基于音韵多样性。与 ASJP 不同，我们的方法不需要语言群体内部分类的任何信息。此外，该方法可以使用一种语言及其方言的所有可用词汇表，回避了“语言”与“方言”的争论。我们进一步结合这些日期，并提供了一个新的基准，据我们所知，这是最好的基准。我们对我们的方法、ASJP 的约会程序和合并的日期进行了系统的比较。我们使用这个新的基准来预测世界语言家族和子家族的时间深度。最后，我们根据 Nettle 提出的语言变化模型解释我们的结果。
