Simon J Greenhill
Biographic Data
| ID | 235320 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Simon J Greenhill |
| GIVEN NAMES | Simon J |
| FAMILY NAME | Greenhill |
| SIGNATURE | GREENHILL S J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7832-6156 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 50 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Different models, different assumptions, different findings
Article Different models, different assumptions, different findings: commentary on “Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology” by Becker and Guzmán Naranjo was published on July 28, 2025 in the journal Linguistic Typology (volume 0, issue 0)
Diachrony and Diachronica
Three evolutionary radiations shaped the evolution of global religious diversity
Religious diversity has had profound consequences in human history, but the dynamics of how it evolves remain unclear. One unresolved question is the extent to which religious denominations accumulate gradually or are generated in rapid bursts associated with specific historical events. Anecdotal evidence tends to favour the second view, but quantitative evidence on a global scale is lacking. Phylogenetic methods that treat religious denomination…
A quantitative global test of the complexity trade-off hypothesis
Nouns and verbs are known to differ in the types of grammatical information they encode. What is less well known is the relationship between verbal and nominal coding within and across languages. The equi-complexity hypothesis holds that all languages are equally complex overall, which entails trade-offs between coding in different domains. From a diachronic point of view, this hypothesis implies that the loss and gain of coding in different doma…
A recent northern origin for the Uto-Aztecan family
A recent northern origin for the Uto-Aztecan family
The Uto-Aztecan language family is one of the largest language families in the Americas. However, there has been considerable debate about its origin and how it spread. Here we use Bayesian phylogenetic methods to analyze lexical data from thirty-four Uto-Aztecan varieties and two Kiowa-Tanoan languages. We infer the age of Proto-Uto-Aztecan to be around 4,100 years (3,258-5,025 years) and identify the most likely homeland to be near what is now …
Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss
While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2,400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank allows us to quantify the relative effects of genealogical inheritance and geographic proximity on t…
Blowing in the wind
Language documentation faces a persistent and pervasive problem: How much material is enough to represent a language fully? How much text would we need to sample the full phoneme inventory of a language? In the phonetic/phonemic domain, what proportion of the phoneme inventory can we expect to sample in a text of a given length? Answering these questions in a quantifiable way is tricky, but asking them is necessary. The cumulative collection of I…
The Austronesian Game Taxonomy
Humans in most cultures around the world play rule-based games, yet research on the content and structure of these games is limited. Previous studies investigating rule-based games across cultures have either focused on a small handful of cultures, thus limiting the generalizability of findings, or used cross-cultural databases from which the raw data are not accessible, thus limiting the transparency, applicability, and replicability of research…
Pathways to social inequality
Chield
Language is one of the most complex of human traits. There are many hypotheses about how it originated, what factors shaped its diversity, and what ongoing processes drive how it changes. We present the Causal Hypotheses in Evolutionary Linguistics Database (CHIELD, https://chield.excd.org/), a tool for expressing, exploring, and evaluating hypotheses. It allows researchers to integrate multiple theories into a coherent narrative, helping to desi…
Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan
Significance Given its size and geographical extension, Sino-Tibetan is of the highest importance for understanding the prehistory of East Asia, and of neighboring language families. Based on a dataset of 50 Sino-Tibetan languages, we infer phylogenies that date the origin of the language family to around 7200 B.P., linking the origin of the language family with the late Cishan and the early Yangshao cultures.
Post-marital residence patterns show lineage-specific evolution
Where a newly-married couple lives, termed post-marital residence, varies cross-culturally and changes over time. While many factors have been proposed as drivers of this change, among them general features of human societies like warfare, migration and gendered division of subsistence labour, little is known about whether changes in residence patterns exhibit global regularities. Here, we study ethnographic observations of post-marital residence…
Population Size and the Rate of Language Evolution
What role does speaker population size play in shaping rates of language evolution? There has been little consensus on the expected relationship between rates and patterns of language change and speaker population size, with some predicting faster rates of change in smaller populations, and others expecting greater change in larger populations. The growth of comparative databases has allowed population size effects to be investigated across a wid…
A Combined Comparative and Phylogenetic Analysis of the Chapacuran Language Family
The Chapacuran language family, with three extant members and nine historically attested lects, has yet to be classified following modern standards in historical linguistics. This paper presents an internal classification of these languages by combining both the traditional comparative method (CM) and Bayesian phylogenetic inference (BPI). We identify multiple systematic sound correspondences and 285 cognate sets of basic vocabulary using the ava…
Evolution and Language
Research priorities in historical-comparative linguistics
International audience
Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family
A Family of Languages English is part of the large Indo-European language family, which includes Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Balto-Slavic, and Indo-Iranian languages. The origin of this family is hotly debated: one hypothesis places the origin north of the Caspian Sea in the Pontic steppes, from where it was disseminated by Kurgan semi-nomadic pastoralists; a second suggests that Anatolia, in modern-day Turkey, is the source, and the language radia…
Basic vocabulary and Bayesian phylolinguistics
Donohue et al.’s critique of our work on the origins and spread of the Austronesian language family is marred by misunderstandings. We respond to these by noting that our Bayesian phylogenetic approach: (1) distinguishes between retentions and innovations probabilistically, (2) focuses on basic vocabulary not ‘the lexicon’, (3) eliminates known loanwords, (4) produces results that are congruent with the results of the comparative method and confl…
Levenshtein Distances Fail to Identify Language Relationships Accurately
The Levenshtein distance is a simple distance metric derived from the number of edit operations needed to transform one string into another. This metric has received recent attention as a means of automatically classifying languages into genealogical subgroups. In this article I test the performance of the Levenshtein distance for classifying languages by subsampling three language subsets from a large database of Austronesian languages. Comparin…
Matrilocal residence is ancestral in Austronesian societies
The nature of social life in human prehistory is elusive, yet knowing how kinship systems evolve is critical for understanding population history and cultural diversity. Post-marital residence rules specify sex-specific dispersal and kin association, influencing the pattern of genetic markers across populations. Cultural phylogenetics allows us to practise ‘virtual archaeology’ on these aspects of social life that leave no trace in the archaeolog…
Population Size and the Rate of Language Evolution
What role does speaker population size play in shaping rates of language evolution? There has been little consensus on the expected relationship between rates and patterns of language change and speaker population size, with some predicting faster rates of change in smaller populations, and others expecting greater change in larger populations. The growth of comparative databases has allowed population size effects to be investigated across a wid…
A Combined Comparative and Phylogenetic Analysis of the Chapacuran Language Family
The Chapacuran language family, with three extant members and nine historically attested lects, has yet to be classified following modern standards in historical linguistics. This paper presents an internal classification of these languages by combining both the traditional comparative method (CM) and Bayesian phylogenetic inference (BPI). We identify multiple systematic sound correspondences and 285 cognate sets of basic vocabulary using the ava…
Pathways to social inequality
Levenshtein Distances Fail to Identify Language Relationships Accurately
The Levenshtein distance is a simple distance metric derived from the number of edit operations needed to transform one string into another. This metric has received recent attention as a means of automatically classifying languages into genealogical subgroups. In this article I test the performance of the Levenshtein distance for classifying languages by subsampling three language subsets from a large database of Austronesian languages. Comparin…
A recent northern origin for the Uto-Aztecan family
The Uto-Aztecan language family is one of the largest language families in the Americas. However, there has been considerable debate about its origin and how it spread. Here we use Bayesian phylogenetic methods to analyze lexical data from thirty-four Uto-Aztecan varieties and two Kiowa-Tanoan languages. We infer the age of Proto-Uto-Aztecan to be around 4,100 years (3,258-5,025 years) and identify the most likely homeland to be near what is now …
Matrilocal residence is ancestral in Austronesian societies
The nature of social life in human prehistory is elusive, yet knowing how kinship systems evolve is critical for understanding population history and cultural diversity. Post-marital residence rules specify sex-specific dispersal and kin association, influencing the pattern of genetic markers across populations. Cultural phylogenetics allows us to practise ‘virtual archaeology’ on these aspects of social life that leave no trace in the archaeolog…
Levenshtein Distances Fail to Identify Language Relationships Accurately
The Levenshtein distance is a simple distance metric derived from the number of edit operations needed to transform one string into another. This metric has received recent attention as a means of automatically classifying languages into genealogical subgroups. In this article I test the performance of the Levenshtein distance for classifying languages by subsampling three language subsets from a large database of Austronesian languages. Comparin…
Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family
A Family of Languages English is part of the large Indo-European language family, which includes Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Balto-Slavic, and Indo-Iranian languages. The origin of this family is hotly debated: one hypothesis places the origin north of the Caspian Sea in the Pontic steppes, from where it was disseminated by Kurgan semi-nomadic pastoralists; a second suggests that Anatolia, in modern-day Turkey, is the source, and the language radia…
Basic vocabulary and Bayesian phylolinguistics
Donohue et al.’s critique of our work on the origins and spread of the Austronesian language family is marred by misunderstandings. We respond to these by noting that our Bayesian phylogenetic approach: (1) distinguishes between retentions and innovations probabilistically, (2) focuses on basic vocabulary not ‘the lexicon’, (3) eliminates known loanwords, (4) produces results that are congruent with the results of the comparative method and confl…
Research priorities in historical-comparative linguistics
International audience
Evolution and Language
A Combined Comparative and Phylogenetic Analysis of the Chapacuran Language Family
The Chapacuran language family, with three extant members and nine historically attested lects, has yet to be classified following modern standards in historical linguistics. This paper presents an internal classification of these languages by combining both the traditional comparative method (CM) and Bayesian phylogenetic inference (BPI). We identify multiple systematic sound correspondences and 285 cognate sets of basic vocabulary using the ava…
Post-marital residence patterns show lineage-specific evolution
Where a newly-married couple lives, termed post-marital residence, varies cross-culturally and changes over time. While many factors have been proposed as drivers of this change, among them general features of human societies like warfare, migration and gendered division of subsistence labour, little is known about whether changes in residence patterns exhibit global regularities. Here, we study ethnographic observations of post-marital residence…
Population Size and the Rate of Language Evolution
What role does speaker population size play in shaping rates of language evolution? There has been little consensus on the expected relationship between rates and patterns of language change and speaker population size, with some predicting faster rates of change in smaller populations, and others expecting greater change in larger populations. The growth of comparative databases has allowed population size effects to be investigated across a wid…
Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan
Significance Given its size and geographical extension, Sino-Tibetan is of the highest importance for understanding the prehistory of East Asia, and of neighboring language families. Based on a dataset of 50 Sino-Tibetan languages, we infer phylogenies that date the origin of the language family to around 7200 B.P., linking the origin of the language family with the late Cishan and the early Yangshao cultures.
Chield
Language is one of the most complex of human traits. There are many hypotheses about how it originated, what factors shaped its diversity, and what ongoing processes drive how it changes. We present the Causal Hypotheses in Evolutionary Linguistics Database (CHIELD, https://chield.excd.org/), a tool for expressing, exploring, and evaluating hypotheses. It allows researchers to integrate multiple theories into a coherent narrative, helping to desi…
The Austronesian Game Taxonomy
Humans in most cultures around the world play rule-based games, yet research on the content and structure of these games is limited. Previous studies investigating rule-based games across cultures have either focused on a small handful of cultures, thus limiting the generalizability of findings, or used cross-cultural databases from which the raw data are not accessible, thus limiting the transparency, applicability, and replicability of research…
Pathways to social inequality
Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss
While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2,400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank allows us to quantify the relative effects of genealogical inheritance and geographic proximity on t…
Blowing in the wind
Language documentation faces a persistent and pervasive problem: How much material is enough to represent a language fully? How much text would we need to sample the full phoneme inventory of a language? In the phonetic/phonemic domain, what proportion of the phoneme inventory can we expect to sample in a text of a given length? Answering these questions in a quantifiable way is tricky, but asking them is necessary. The cumulative collection of I…
A quantitative global test of the complexity trade-off hypothesis
Nouns and verbs are known to differ in the types of grammatical information they encode. What is less well known is the relationship between verbal and nominal coding within and across languages. The equi-complexity hypothesis holds that all languages are equally complex overall, which entails trade-offs between coding in different domains. From a diachronic point of view, this hypothesis implies that the loss and gain of coding in different doma…
A recent northern origin for the Uto-Aztecan family
A recent northern origin for the Uto-Aztecan family
The Uto-Aztecan language family is one of the largest language families in the Americas. However, there has been considerable debate about its origin and how it spread. Here we use Bayesian phylogenetic methods to analyze lexical data from thirty-four Uto-Aztecan varieties and two Kiowa-Tanoan languages. We infer the age of Proto-Uto-Aztecan to be around 4,100 years (3,258-5,025 years) and identify the most likely homeland to be near what is now …
Different models, different assumptions, different findings
Article Different models, different assumptions, different findings: commentary on “Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology” by Becker and Guzmán Naranjo was published on July 28, 2025 in the journal Linguistic Typology (volume 0, issue 0)
Diachrony and Diachronica
Three evolutionary radiations shaped the evolution of global religious diversity
Religious diversity has had profound consequences in human history, but the dynamics of how it evolves remain unclear. One unresolved question is the extent to which religious denominations accumulate gradually or are generated in rapid bursts associated with specific historical events. Anecdotal evidence tends to favour the second view, but quantitative evidence on a global scale is lacking. Phylogenetic methods that treat religious denomination…
Language and cultural evolution (17 works) · Linguistics (13 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Biology (8 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · History (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Artificial Intelligence (5 works)