Talks of the Past open seminar: From Phonology to Phylogeny: Inferring Language Trees from Cognate Word Forms
Abstract Linguistic phylogenies are commonly inferred from abstract cognate classifications that encode relationships among lexemes. Although widespread, this practice has well-recognised limitations: it discards phylogenetic signal contained in segmental word forms, restricts the range of evolutionary questions that can be addressed, and treats cognacy judgments, which are hypotheses in their own right, as observed data. […]