Reading tips by CHP


Erik Elgh & Harald Hammarström. 2024. The dialect chain tree.

A perennial conflict in historical linguistics centers around the theoretical and practical virtues of tree-like divergence and wave-like diffusion. The Dialect Chain Tree is an extension of the tree model that incorporates both tree-like descent and disintegration of dialect chains in a systematic fashion. As such, it provides a formalization and sharpening of Ross’ (1997: 212–228) linkage concept that allows integration into quantitative approaches.

Keywords: phylogeneticssubgrouping, dialect chaintrees and waves


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    Ideas that change the world.

    Human Evolution was the focus of the latest episode (Season 6, Ep. 112) in the Nobel Prize Museum’s podcast series, Ideas that change the world, with Mattias Jakobsson. We all […]

  • The Center starts own YouTube channel

    The Center starts own YouTube channel

    In our quest to disseminate knowledge and educate about interdisciplinary research on human prehistory, we add selected recorded seminars (Talks of the Past open seminars in particular) and other related […]

  • The Indo-European Cognate Relationships dataset is now published in Nature

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    Abstract The Indo-European Cognate Relationships (IE-CoR) dataset is an open-access relational dataset showing how related, inherited words (‘cognates’) pattern across 160 languages of the Indo-European family. IE-CoR is intended as […]