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Abstract Details
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Activity Number:
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163
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Type:
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Topic Contributed
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Date/Time:
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Monday, August 1, 2011 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
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Sponsor:
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Section on Bayesian Statistical Science
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| Abstract - #301067 |
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Title:
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A Phylogenetic Model of Language Diversification for the Dating of Proto-Indo-European
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Author(s):
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Robin Jeremy Ryder*+ and Geoff Keith Nicholls
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Companies:
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ENSAE and University of Oxford
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Address:
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Timbre J340, Malakoff, International, 92240, France
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Keywords:
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MCMC ;
language diversification ;
dating ;
phylogenetics
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Abstract:
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Language diversification is a random process comparable in many ways to biological evolution. We model the diversification of so-called "core" lexical data by a stochastic process on a phylogenetic tree. We focus on the Indo-European language family. The age of the most recent common ancestor of these languages is of particular interest and issues of dating ancient languages have been subject to controversy. We use Markov Chain Monte Carlo to estimate the tree topology, internal node ages and model parameters. Our model includes several aspects specific to language diversification, such as rate heterogeneity and the data registration process, and we show that lexical borrowing does not bias our estimates. We show the robustness of our model and analyse two independent data sets to estimate the age of Proto-Indo-European.
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