3 ms·

This is for entertainment value only. There are many ways to get ratings of language similarity (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_comparative_ling

by glup 11y ago

This is for entertainment value only. There are many ways to get ratings of language similarity (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_comparative_linguistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_comparative_lingu... for an overview) and this graphic is from a paper published before Bayesian phylogenetic methods took over the field (I can't read the original Russian though). For more recent research, see the second two figures at http://language.cs.auckland.ac.nz/media-material/ http://language.cs.auckland.ac.nz/media-material/

ggchappell 11y ago
Would you say that more recent methods allow us to talk about degree of language similarity in a way that is objective enough and meaningful/useful enough that the results are not "for entertainment value only"?
- glup 11y ago
  "Objective enough" isn't the issue, rather it's how confident we are in the inferences. And yes, I would say that the new methods are preferable because 1) they do a better job of explicitly quantifying and representing uncertainty 2) they use more sophisticated source data/features.
kafkaesq 11y ago
This is for entertainment value only. I disagree. The charts you linked to are quite interesting and go much deeper. They're also harder to parse, both visually and conceptually. But (for the unacquainted) the original chart tells you right away -- bang! -- how the main linguistic groups in Europe relate to each other, to a first-order approximation (give or take a few regrettable omissions). Keep in mind that many people are still very ignorant of even the basic overlaps between these families (like that English and German are actually quite close, for example). And this has a lot to with why they think that learning another language (as an adult) is much more difficult than it really is.

3 ms·

This is for entertainment value only. There are many ways to get ratings of language similarity (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_comparative_ling

by glup 11y ago

ggchappell 11y ago
Would you say that more recent methods allow us to talk about degree of language similarity in a way that is objective enough and meaningful/useful enough that the results are not "for entertainment value only"?
- glup 11y ago
  "Objective enough" isn't the issue, rather it's how confident we are in the inferences. And yes, I would say that the new methods are preferable because 1) they do a better job of explicitly quantifying and representing uncertainty 2) they use more sophisticated source data/features.
kafkaesq 11y ago
This is for entertainment value only. I disagree. The charts you linked to are quite interesting and go much deeper. They're also harder to parse, both visually and conceptually. But (for the unacquainted) the original chart tells you right away -- bang! -- how the main linguistic groups in Europe relate to each other, to a first-order approximation (give or take a few regrettable omissions). Keep in mind that many people are still very ignorant of even the basic overlaps between these families (like that English and German are actually quite close, for example). And this has a lot to with why they think that learning another language (as an adult) is much more difficult than it really is.