Phylogenetic linguistic evidence and the Dene-Yeniseian homeland
| Autor: | Igor Yanovich |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
0106 biological sciences
0303 health sciences Linguistics and Language History Phylogenetic tree Folklore Best practice Linguistic evidence Homeland 010603 evolutionary biology 01 natural sciences Language and Linguistics Linguistics 03 medical and health sciences Computational phylogenetics 030304 developmental biology |
| Zdroj: | Diachronica. 37:410-446 |
| ISSN: | 1569-9714 0176-4225 |
| Popis: | Sicoli & Holton (2014) (PLoS ONE 9:3, e91722) use computational phylogenetics to argue that linguistic data from the putative, but likely, Dene-Yeniseian macro-family are better compatible with a homeland in Beringia (i.e., northeastern Siberia plus northwestern Alaska) than with one in central Siberia or deeper Asia. I show that a more careful examination of the data invalidates this conclusion: in fact, linguistic data do not support Beringia as the homeland. In the course of showing this, I discuss, without requiring a deep mathematical background, a number of methodological issues concerning computational phylogenetic analyses of linguistic data and drawing inferences from them. The aim is to contribute to making computational phylogenetics less of a black box for historical linguists. I conclude with a brief overview of the current evidence bearing on the Dene-Yeniseian homeland from linguistics, archaeology, folklore studies and genetics, and suggest current best practice for linguistic phylogenetics, the use of which would have helped to avoid some of the problems in Sicoli and Holton’s Dene-Yeniseian study, and in turn the percolation of those problems into subsequent synthetic interdisciplinary research. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
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