Ah I see I have been a little sloppy with my language—mea culpa
The extent to which traits and phylogenies are correlated is an open research question, see this wikipedia article. But aspects of biology that are unique to phylogenies such as diversification interact with traits in complex ways. The SSE models are a good introduction to the methodology of this (background here).
I don’t know how to attach these ideas to linguistics because I can’t think of a good concrete example.
As an aside, you also say that
For example, a notion of difficulty of the variants can be used (with care) to infer which variant is more likely to be original
There are things of this kind in historical linguistics, though less subtle and complex, such as analogy. But nothing that I know of in phylogenetics.
But this is very well understood in phylogenetics. This is the basis of codon models and the “maximum likelihood school” of phylogenetic modelling. You can see this by looking at IQ-TREE (a modern phylogenetic inference tool): https://iqtree.github.io/doc/Substitution-Models
But this is very well understood in phylogenetics. This is the basis of codon models and the “maximum likelihood school” of phylogenetic modelling. You can see this by looking at IQ-TREE (a modern phylogenetic inference tool): https://iqtree.github.io/doc/Substitution-Models
Good point! I guess I was mostly thinking of changes at the trait level, but you are right that now even for species the gene level is used, and that there are much more precise models of mutations at the gene level.
I haven’t explored this in enough detail to figure out if there is anything as subtle as the diffraction process of textual criticism, where the hard reading is not only replaced by simpler ones but lost completely, yet can sometimes be inferred back from the meter of poem and the rhymes and other constraints.
The extent to which traits and phylogenies are correlated is an open research question, see this wikipedia article. But aspects of biology that are unique to phylogenies such as diversification interact with traits in complex ways. The SSE models are a good introduction to the methodology of this (background here).
I don’t know how to attach these ideas to linguistics because I can’t think of a good concrete example.
Ah, I understand now.
Then I would say the similar claim in historical linguistics would be that languages which are more closely related genealogically would be more mutually intelligible.
For example, as a french speaker I can partially understand Italian much more than I can understand German (speaking neither).
The claim is weaker/broken in cases where one of the two languages has extensive borrowing from another unrelated language (for Romance, Spanish is an example because of its many borrowings from Arabic)
As for textual criticism, the analogy would be that the closest manuscripts are related, the more they “feel the same”. But honestly this would be much more subtle, given that different manuscripts are much closer than different species or languages.
Ah I see I have been a little sloppy with my language—mea culpa
The extent to which traits and phylogenies are correlated is an open research question, see this wikipedia article. But aspects of biology that are unique to phylogenies such as diversification interact with traits in complex ways. The SSE models are a good introduction to the methodology of this (background here).
I don’t know how to attach these ideas to linguistics because I can’t think of a good concrete example.
As an aside, you also say that
But this is very well understood in phylogenetics. This is the basis of codon models and the “maximum likelihood school” of phylogenetic modelling. You can see this by looking at IQ-TREE (a modern phylogenetic inference tool): https://iqtree.github.io/doc/Substitution-Models
Good point! I guess I was mostly thinking of changes at the trait level, but you are right that now even for species the gene level is used, and that there are much more precise models of mutations at the gene level.
I haven’t explored this in enough detail to figure out if there is anything as subtle as the diffraction process of textual criticism, where the hard reading is not only replaced by simpler ones but lost completely, yet can sometimes be inferred back from the meter of poem and the rhymes and other constraints.
Ah, I understand now.
Then I would say the similar claim in historical linguistics would be that languages which are more closely related genealogically would be more mutually intelligible.
For example, as a french speaker I can partially understand Italian much more than I can understand German (speaking neither).
The claim is weaker/broken in cases where one of the two languages has extensive borrowing from another unrelated language (for Romance, Spanish is an example because of its many borrowings from Arabic)
As for textual criticism, the analogy would be that the closest manuscripts are related, the more they “feel the same”. But honestly this would be much more subtle, given that different manuscripts are much closer than different species or languages.