Σύγκριση μεθόδων

	Phylogenetic Linguistics	Lexicostatistics
Πεδίο	Γλωσσολογία	Γλωσσολογία
Οικογένεια	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Έτος προέλευσης	2003	1952
Δημιουργός	Russell Gray & Quentin Atkinson (modern Bayesian application); rooted in computational phylogenetics	Morris Swadesh
Τύπος	Computational inference of language family trees and divergence dates from coded linguistic data	Quantitative comparison of basic vocabulary to estimate genealogical relatedness
Θεμελιώδης πηγή	Gray, R. D., & Atkinson, Q. D. (2003). Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin. Nature, 426(6965), 435–439.	Swadesh, M. (1952). Lexico-statistic dating of prehistoric ethnic contacts. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 96(4), 452–463.
Εναλλακτικές ονομασίες	Linguistic Phylogenetics, Computational Language Phylogenetics, Phylogenetic Language Classification	Lexical Statistics, Basic Vocabulary Comparison, Cognate Percentage Method
Συναφείς	4	4
Σύνοψη	Computational phylogenetic linguistics borrows the statistical machinery developed in evolutionary biology — Bayesian inference, maximum likelihood, and distance-based network methods — and applies it to coded linguistic data, chiefly cognate-judged basic vocabulary, to infer language family trees and estimate when branches diverged. By treating linguistic characters like the molecular characters in a gene alignment and modelling their change probabilistically along a tree, the approach produces classifications with explicit measures of uncertainty and, when calibrated, dated phylogenies. Its best-known applications are the Gray and Atkinson and Bouckaert et al. analyses of Indo-European origins.	Lexicostatistics is a quantitative method in historical linguistics that gauges how closely two or more languages are genealogically related by measuring the percentage of cognates they share within a fixed list of basic, culture-neutral vocabulary — classically Morris Swadesh's 100- or 200-word list. By converting word comparisons into similarity percentages, it produces a matrix of pairwise scores from which subgroupings within a language family can be inferred. It is the statistical core that underlies glottochronology, but on its own it makes no claim about absolute dates — it speaks only to degree of relatedness.