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The Basis of Glottochronology

LanguagePublished 1 June 1953
Robert Β. Lees
Citations150
SJR quartileQ1
SJR score1.02
SNIP1.84

Abstract

[It is shown that a linguistic dating system can be set up on the basis of several explicit assumptions about morpheme decay. Thirteen sets of data, presented in partial justification of these assumptions, serve as a basis for calculating a universal constant to express the average rate of retention k ̄ of the basic-root-morphemes : k = 0.8048 ± 0.0176 per millennium, with a confidence limit of 90%. Finally an expression is derived for the sampling-error to be expected in the calculated time-depths of related dialects.]

Keywords

Arts and Humanities