Cognate reflex prediction as hypothesis test for a genealogical relation between the Panoan and Takanan language families.

We present a novel approach for testing genealogical relations between language families. Our method, which has previously only been applied to closely related languages, makes predictions for cognate reflexes based on the regularity of proposed sound correspondences between language families that are hypothesized to be related. We test the hypothesis about a genealogical relation between Panoan and Takanan, two linguistic families of the Amazon.

Consonant lengthening marks the beginning of words across a diverse sample of languages.

Speech consists of a continuous stream of acoustic signals, yet humans can segment words and other constituents from each other with astonishing precision. The acoustic properties that support this process are not well understood and remain understudied for the vast majority of the world's languages, in particular regarding their potential variation. Here we report cross-linguistic evidence for the lengthening of word-initial consonants across a typologically diverse sample of 51 languages.

Grouping sounds into evolving units for the purpose of historical language comparison.

Computer-assisted approaches to historical language comparison have made great progress during the past two decades. Scholars can now routinely use computational tools to annotate cognate sets, align words, and search for regularly recurring sound correspondences. However, computational approaches still suffer from a very rigid sequence model of the form part of the linguistic sign, in which words and morphemes are segmented into fixed sound units which cannot be modified.

A comparative wordlist for investigating distant relations among languages in Lowland South America.

The history of the language families in Lowland South America remains an understudied area of historical linguistics. Panoan and Tacanan, two language families from this area, have frequently been proposed to descend from the same ancestor. Despite ample evidence in favor of this hypothesis, not all scholars accept it as proven beyond doubt.

Grammars Across Time Analyzed (GATA): a dataset of 52 languages.

Grammars Across Time Analyzed (GATA) is a resource capturing two snapshots of the grammatical structure of a diverse range of languages separated in time, aimed at furthering research on historical linguistics, language evolution, and cultural change. GATA comprises grammatical information on 52 diverse languages across all continents, featuring morphological, syntactic, and phonological information based on published grammars of the same language at two different time points. Here we introduce the coding scheme and design features of GATA, and we describe some salient patterns related to language change and the coverage of grammatical descriptions over time.