The notion that patterns of linguistic and biological variation may cast light on each other and on population histories dates back to Darwin’s times; yet, turning this intuition into a proper research program has met with serious methodological difficulties, especially affecting language comparisons. This article takes advantage of two new tools of comparative linguis- tics: a refined list of Indo-European cognate words, and a novel method of language comparison estimating linguistic diversity from a universal inventory of grammatical poly- morphisms, and hence enabling comparison even across different families. We corroborated the method and used it to compare patterns of linguistic and genomic variation in Europe.
Across Language Families: Genome Diversity Mirrors Linguistic Variation Within Europe / Guardiano, Cristina; G., Longobardi; S., Ghirotto; A., Ceolin; A. Benazzo, F. Tassi; G., Barbujani. - (2015). (Intervento presentato al convegno Biolinguistic Investigations on the Language Faculty. tenutosi a Pavia nel 26-28 Gennaio 2015).
Across Language Families: Genome Diversity Mirrors Linguistic Variation Within Europe
GUARDIANO, Cristina;
2015
Abstract
The notion that patterns of linguistic and biological variation may cast light on each other and on population histories dates back to Darwin’s times; yet, turning this intuition into a proper research program has met with serious methodological difficulties, especially affecting language comparisons. This article takes advantage of two new tools of comparative linguis- tics: a refined list of Indo-European cognate words, and a novel method of language comparison estimating linguistic diversity from a universal inventory of grammatical poly- morphisms, and hence enabling comparison even across different families. We corroborated the method and used it to compare patterns of linguistic and genomic variation in Europe.
Pubblicazioni consigliate
I metadati presenti in IRIS UNIMORE sono rilasciati con licenza Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal, mentre i file delle pubblicazioni sono rilasciati con licenza Attribuzione 4.0 Internazionale (CC BY 4.0), salvo diversa indicazione.
In caso di violazione di copyright, contattare Supporto Iris
