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Research Article

Automated reconstruction of ancient languages using probabilistic models of sound change

Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, David Hall, Thomas L. Griffiths, and Dan Klein
  1. aDepartment of Statistics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada;
  2. bComputer Science Division and
  3. cDepartment of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720

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PNAS first published February 11, 2013; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1204678110
Alexandre Bouchard-Côté
aDepartment of Statistics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada;
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  • For correspondence: bouchard@stat.ubc.ca
David Hall
bComputer Science Division and
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Thomas L. Griffiths
cDepartment of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720
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Dan Klein
bComputer Science Division and
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  1. Edited by Nick Chater, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom, and accepted by the Editorial Board December 22, 2012 (received for review March 19, 2012)

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Abstract

One of the oldest problems in linguistics is reconstructing the words that appeared in the protolanguages from which modern languages evolved. Identifying the forms of these ancient languages makes it possible to evaluate proposals about the nature of language change and to draw inferences about human history. Protolanguages are typically reconstructed using a painstaking manual process known as the comparative method. We present a family of probabilistic models of sound change as well as algorithms for performing inference in these models. The resulting system automatically and accurately reconstructs protolanguages from modern languages. We apply this system to 637 Austronesian languages, providing an accurate, large-scale automatic reconstruction of a set of protolanguages. Over 85% of the system’s reconstructions are within one character of the manual reconstruction provided by a linguist specializing in Austronesian languages. Being able to automatically reconstruct large numbers of languages provides a useful way to quantitatively explore hypotheses about the factors determining which sounds in a language are likely to change over time. We demonstrate this by showing that the reconstructed Austronesian protolanguages provide compelling support for a hypothesis about the relationship between the function of a sound and its probability of changing that was first proposed in 1955.

  • ancestral
  • computational
  • diachronic

Footnotes

  • ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: bouchard{at}stat.ubc.ca.
  • Author contributions: A.B.-C., D.H., T.L.G., and D.K. designed research; A.B.-C. and D.H. performed research; A.B.-C. and D.H. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; A.B.-C., D.H., T.L.G., and D.K. analyzed data; and A.B.-C., D.H., T.L.G., and D.K. wrote the paper.

  • The authors declare no conflict of interest.

  • This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. N.C. is a guest editor invited by the Editorial Board.

  • This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1204678110/-/DCSupplemental.

Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.

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Automated reconstruction of ancient languages
Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, David Hall, Thomas L. Griffiths, Dan Klein
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Feb 2013, 201204678; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1204678110

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Automated reconstruction of ancient languages
Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, David Hall, Thomas L. Griffiths, Dan Klein
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Feb 2013, 201204678; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1204678110
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