29 research outputs found
Measures of lexical distance between languages
The idea of measuring distance between languages seems to have its roots in
the work of the French explorer Dumont D'Urville \cite{Urv}. He collected
comparative words lists of various languages during his voyages aboard the
Astrolabe from 1826 to 1829 and, in his work about the geographical division of
the Pacific, he proposed a method to measure the degree of relation among
languages. The method used by modern glottochronology, developed by Morris
Swadesh in the 1950s, measures distances from the percentage of shared
cognates, which are words with a common historical origin. Recently, we
proposed a new automated method which uses normalized Levenshtein distance
among words with the same meaning and averages on the words contained in a
list. Recently another group of scholars \cite{Bak, Hol} proposed a refined of
our definition including a second normalization. In this paper we compare the
information content of our definition with the refined version in order to
decide which of the two can be applied with greater success to resolve
relationships among languages
Lexical evolution rates by automated stability measure
Phylogenetic trees can be reconstructed from the matrix which contains the
distances between all pairs of languages in a family. Recently, we proposed a
new method which uses normalized Levenshtein distances among words with same
meaning and averages on all the items of a given list. Decisions about the
number of items in the input lists for language comparison have been debated
since the beginning of glottochronology. The point is that words associated to
some of the meanings have a rapid lexical evolution. Therefore, a large
vocabulary comparison is only apparently more accurate then a smaller one since
many of the words do not carry any useful information. In principle, one should
find the optimal length of the input lists studying the stability of the
different items. In this paper we tackle the problem with an automated
methodology only based on our normalized Levenshtein distance. With this
approach, the program of an automated reconstruction of languages relationships
is completed
Making sense of law and disorder
This article tells the story of a cross-cultural encounter on a beach at King George\u27s Sound in the south west of Australia in 1826, when Major Edmund Lockyer arrived to establish a British military garrison. The account we have of those early encounters come from the pen of Lockyer, and by taking a close reading of his journal this article attempts to reveal the meanings and context of Aboriginal actions. It also analyses how the Aborigines and the British made sense and subsequently responded to the encounter. Whilst this story is not given iconic status in Australian historiography, it is valuable in opening up a porthole into this contact zone at the moment when precarious relationships were being formed.<br /
Voyage de la corvette lâAstrolabe : exeÌcuteÌ par ordre du roi, pendant les anneÌes 1826, 1827, 1828, 1829, sous le commandement de M. J. Dumont DâUrville, capitaine de vaisseau.
Scanned from the original held Special Collections, Barr Smith Library.A selection of plates from this book