Evolution Times of Languages

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Abstract
A problem in anthropological linguistics is to reconstruct, from present-day linguistic data, a family tree depicting the ancestry of a family of languages. There are two parts to the problem. The first is to construct the family tree showing the sequence of language separations; this is analogous to classifying biological species by degree of similarity. The second is to estimate when the separations occurred. In this article, a stochastic model is given for the process of language change. Then a statistical procedure is developed for estimating the separation times and characterizing the rates of word replacement.

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