Current Issues in Linguistic Taxonomy

Bibliographic Data

ID2296424
AuthorsPeter A Michalove (University of Illinois, 307 S. McKinley, Champaign, IL 61821-3247), Stefan Georg (0000-0001-9981-2444, University of Bonn, Heerstrasse 7, Bonn, D-53111 Federal Republic of Germany), Alexis Manaster Ramer (Wayne State University, 4225 Walden Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48105)
Year1998
Volume27
Issue1
Pages451-472
Publication date1998-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnnual Review of Anthropology (BOOK_SERIES)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0084-6570 • E-ISSN: 1545-4290
PublisherAnnual Reviews (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1146/annurev.anthro.27.1.451
OpenAlexW2122565923
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited43

The genealogical classification of languages has been the subject of investigation for more than two centuries, and progress continues to be made in deepening our understanding of language change, both in theoretical terms and in the study of specific language families. In recent years, as in the past, many new proposals of linguistic relationships have been constructed, some promising to various degrees and others clearly untenable. The debate about specific recent proposals is part of the healthy process needed to evaluate proposed relationships, discard those that prove incorrect, and refine those of merit. Rather than evaluating the relative linguistic "distance" between potentially related languages, with temporal distance leading to some point where we cannot distinguish real relationships from chance similarities, we propose a scale of easy to difficult relationships in which temporal distance is only one factor that makes some relationships more recognizable than others

Cartography · Geography · Linguistics · Point (geometry · Scale (ratio · Sociology · Subject (documents · Taxonomy (biology · Computer Science · Ecology · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Language and cultural evolution · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Philosophy

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