Data Capture and Presentation in the Romanian Online Dialect Atlas

RODA,the Romanian Online Dialect Atlas (Embleton, Uritescu, and Wheeler 2002, 2004,2006, in press), is a two-stage project involving (I) the transfer of data from a hard copy atlas of the Crisana dialect of Romanian (Stan and Uritescu 1996,2003) to an online system for general availability, and (2) the application of innovative statistical methods to the data. Romanian, as the prime exemplar of the eastern Romance languages. has had scholarly attention, including the detailed work of Stan and Britescu (1996,2003) and Uritescu (l984a, 1984b) on the dialects of the Crisana region in north-west Romania. In digitizing this data to make it more broadly accessible, and in successfully digitizing a hardcopy dialect atlas of Finnish (Embleton and Wheeler 1997b, 2000), we encountered several situations worth highlighting to others who may be considering parallel projects

Lexicostatistical tree reconstruction incorporating borrowing

A persistent concern of lexicostatistics has been to eliminate all meanings susceptible to borrowing from the test-list used in family-tree reconstruction for a group of related languages. However, it is not clear that any meanings exist which are completely immune to borrowing, especially in situations of large-scale language contact. There are also considerable statistical advantages in the use of a longer test-list. Thus lexicostatistical tree reconstruction methods can be improved by incorporating borrowing rates as well as replacement rates in the reconstruction process. The system of differential equations necessary for this reconstruction (where the replacement rate r and the borrowing rate b are known) will be presented, together with a computer simulation of the divergence of a language family in which both lexical replacement and borrowing are involved. The results of comparisons of the reconstructed trees with the computer-generated trees for different lengths of test-list and for different values of r and of b show that a high degree of accuracy, both in the topology of the tree and in its relative branch lengths, can be obtained, even for values of rand b considerably higher than those found in natural language

Application of current lexicostatistical methods to Germanic, Romance and Wakashan

Current lexicostatistical methods are able to take account of both rates of change due to replacement and rates of change due to borrowing when reconstructing the family tree for a group of related languages. Thus these methods represent a significant "improvement over previous lexicostatistical methods, such as glottochrono1ogy or hierarchical cluster analysis. In the present paper, the computer-implemented method is applied in turn to 16 Germanic languages, to 8 Romance languages, and to 4 Wakashan languages. In all cases, results in accord with a large body of linguistic opinion are obtained, even where pidgins and creoles are involved, indicating that such lexicostatistical methods can be successful for natural language data

Vocal tract models, formant frequencies and computational methods

The determination of formant (or 'pole') and zero frequencies from area and length data is considered for two- and three-tube vocal tract models. A computer-implemented algorithm is shown to represent an improvement over graphical solution techniques because a discontinuity test is easily included