1887
Quantitative Approaches to Linguistic Diversity: Commemorating the centenary of the birth of Morris Swadesh
  • ISSN 0176-4225
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9714
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Abstract

While his eponymous basic vocabulary lists and the study of language divergence may be Swadesh’s most appreciated legacies, we demonstrate that phonetic quantification of language varieties also follows very much in the tradition of Swadesh’s own work. We compare a few different measures of phonetic distance on a very small set of data from Germanic varieties, showing the influence of lexicostatistics and the relevance of Swadesh’s ‘Mesh Principle’. What we emphasise overall is that Swadesh’s influence is palpable, even in domains outside those for which he is best remembered.

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/content/journals/10.1075/dia.27.2.08sul
2010-01-01
2024-10-07
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/content/journals/10.1075/dia.27.2.08sul
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): language varieties; Levenshtein distance; networks; phonetic features
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