Glottochronology
Today,
lexicostatistics is a subfield of
quantitative linguistics. As the name implies, it deals with statistical methods on lexical material of languages.Within lexicostatistics,
glottochronology is a method used to estimate the time-depth in language change and the date of a language's origin, based on the assumption of constant rates of change in basic vocabulary. This assumption, originally put forward by
Morris Swadesh, was based on an analogy with the use of
C14 dating for measuring the age of organic materials, in that a "lexical
half-life" is estimated and used to extrapolate to the point in time at which the languages in question diverged from a common
proto-language.
The method presumed that the core vocabulary of a language is replaced at a constant (or near constant) rate across all languages and cultures, and could therefore be used to measure the passage of time. The process made use of a list of lexical terms compiled by Morris Swadesh assumed to be resistant against borrowing (originally designed as a list of 200 items; however, the reduced 100 word list is much more common among modern day linguists). This core vocabulary was designed to encompass concepts common to every human language, eliminating concepts that vary by culture and time. Basically, glottochronology used the percentage of
cognates (words that have a common origin) in "basic word lists". The larger the percentage of cognates, the more recently the two languages being compared are presumed to have separated. This assumption has been demonstrated as the basic error, because it neglects the dependence of this percentage on three further factors.
Glottochronology is rejected by mainstream linguists, who view it as having been falsified by many counterexamples. Many claim there is enough evidence to support the idea that languages change at varied rates. For instance, a language's
literature may have a stabilizing effect on a
literate culture's language (McWhorter
page number needed). Above all, language change arises primarily from socio-historical events which are unforeseeable and uncomputable.
Defenders of the method usually point out that while it is true that the phonology and morphology of certain language groups can be prone to ultra-rapid change, the same does not usually apply to the basic lexicon. They argue that, with certain exceptions, that closely related dialects usually share about 90 percent common items on the Swadesh wordlist; closely related language branches (such as
Slavic,
Romance,
Turkic, etc.) share about 70 to 80 percent; and more distantly related languages from families such as
Indo-European share about 25 to 30 per cent. This argument, however, is circular (since the degree of relationship is based on the degree of similarity--i.e., languages are considered dialects because they are mutually intelligible and they are mutually intelligible only because the vast majority (90+%) of their vocabularies match), and is a red herring because it says nothing about the age or time depth of the relationship which is supposed to be the entire point of glottochronology.
Somewhere in between the original concept of Swadesh and the rejection of glottochronology in its entirety lies the idea that glottochronology as a formal method of linguistic analysis becomes valid with the help of several important modifications. In particular, an attempt to introduce such modifications was performed by the Russian linguist
Sergei Starostin, who had proposed that systematic
loanwords, borrowed from one language into another, are a disruptive factor and have to be eliminated from the calculations; that the rate of change is not actually constant, but depends on the time period during which the word has existed in the language (i. e. chances of lexeme X being replaced by lexeme Y increase in direct proportion to the time elapsed - the so called "aging of words"); and that individual items on the 100 wordlist have different stability rates (for instance, the word "I" generally has a much lower chance of being replaced than the word "yellow", etc.).
While the resulting formula, taking into account both the time dependence and the individual stability quotients, is somewhat more complicated from Swadesh's original one, it has also been shown to generally yield more credible results that at least. On the other hand, it shows that glottochronology can really only be used as a serious tool on language families the historical phonology of which has been meticulously elaborated (at least to the point of being able to clearly distinguish between cognates and loanwords).
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*
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* Time Depth in Historical Linguistics (2000). Ed. by Colin Renfrew, April McMahon & Larry Trask. The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, England.
*
Swadesh list in Wiktionary.
*
Discussion with some statistics*
Indo-European lexicostatistical data
