Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history

Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson & Andrew Meade (2007). Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history. Nature, 449,717-720. RAE2008

Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history

Greek speakers say "ovpa", Germans "schwanz'' and the French "queue'' to describe what English speakers call a 'tail', but all of these languages use a related form of 'two' to describe the number after one. Among more than 100 Indo-European languages and dialects, the words for some meanings (such as 'tail') evolve rapidly, being expressed across languages by dozens of unrelated words, while others evolve much more slowly-such as the number 'two', for which all Indo-European language speakers use the same related word-form(1). No general linguistic mechanism has been advanced to explain this striking variation in rates of lexical replacement among meanings. Here we use four large and divergent language corpora (English(2), Spanish(3), Russian(4) and Greek(5)) and a comparative database of 200 fundamental vocabulary meanings in 87 Indo-European languages(6) to show that the frequency with which these words are used in modern language predicts their rate of replacement over thousands of years of Indo-European language evolution. Across all 200 meanings, frequently used words evolve at slower rates and infrequently used words evolve more rapidly. This relationship holds separately and identically across parts of speech for each of the four language corpora, and accounts for approximately 50% of the variation in historical rates of lexical replacement. We propose that the frequency with which specific words are used in everyday language exerts a general and law-like influence on their rates of evolution. Our findings are consistent with social models of word change that emphasize the role of selection, and suggest that owing to the ways that humans use language, some words will evolve slowly and others rapidly across all languages.

Genetics and the origin of European languages.

A new set of European genetic data has been analyzed to dissect independent patterns of geographic variation. The most important cause of European genetic variation has been confirmed to correspond to the migration of Neolithic farmers from the area of origin of agriculture in the Middle East. The next most important component of genetic variation is apparently associated with a north-south gradient possibly due to adaptation to cold climates but also to the differentiation of the Uralic and the Indo-European language-speaking people; however, the relevant correlations are not significantly different from zero after elimination of the spatial autocorrelation. The third component is highly correlated with the infiltration of the Yamna ("Kurgan") people, nomadic pastoralists who domesticated the horse and who have been claimed to have spread Indo-European languages to Europe; this association, which is statistically significant even when taking spatial autocorrelations into account, does not completely exclude the hypothesis of Indo-European as the language of Neolithic farmers. It is possible that both expansions were responsible for the spread of different subfamilies of Indo-European languages, but our genetic data cannot resolve their relative importance.

Grimm's law: a study, or hints towards an explanation of the so-called "lautverschiebung"; to which are added some remarks on the primitive Indo-European k and several appendices.

Mode of access: Internet.

Zipf and Type-Token rules for the English, Spanish, Irish and Latin languages

The Zipf curves of log of frequency against log of rank for a large English corpus of 500 million word tokens, 689,000 word types and for a large Spanish corpus of 16 million word tokens, 139,000 word types are shown to have the usual slope close to –1 for rank less than 5,000, but then for a higher rank they turn to give a slope close to –2. This is apparently mainly due to foreign words and place names. Other Zipf curves for highlyinflected Indo-European languages, Irish and ancient Latin, are also given. Because of the larger number of word types per lemma, they remain flatter than the English curve maintaining a slope of –1 until turning points of about ranks 30,000 for Irish and 10,000 for Latin. A formula which calculates the number of tokens given the number of types is derived in terms of the rank at the turning point, 5,000 for both English and Spanish, 30,000 for Irish and 10,000 for Latin.

A report on the status of Russian and other Slavic and East European languages in the educational institutions of the United States, its territories, possessions and mandates, with additional data on similar studies in Canada and Latin America.

Mode of access: Internet.

Le trasformazioni delle specie e le tre epoche delle lingue e letterature indo-europee;

Mode of access: Internet.

De Indo-Europeiska sprakens forhallande till de Semitiska.

Mode of access: Internet.