Unstable Grounds for Beautiful Trees? Testing the Robustness of Concept Translations in the Compilation of Multilingual Wordlists
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arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , , , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866909519957721088 |
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| author | Snee, David Ciucci, Luca Rubehn, Arne van Dam, Kellen Parker List, Johann-Mattis |
| author_facet | Snee, David Ciucci, Luca Rubehn, Arne van Dam, Kellen Parker List, Johann-Mattis |
| contents | Multilingual wordlists play a crucial role in comparative linguistics. While many studies have been carried out to test the power of computational methods for language subgrouping or divergence time estimation, few studies have put the data upon which these studies are based to a rigorous test. Here, we conduct a first experiment that tests the robustness of concept translation as an integral part of the compilation of multilingual wordlists. Investigating the variation in concept translations in independently compiled wordlists from 10 dataset pairs covering 9 different language families, we find that on average, only 83% of all translations yield the same word form, while identical forms in terms of phonetic transcriptions can only be found in 23% of all cases. Our findings can prove important when trying to assess the uncertainty of phylogenetic studies and the conclusions derived from them. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_00464 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Unstable Grounds for Beautiful Trees? Testing the Robustness of Concept Translations in the Compilation of Multilingual Wordlists Snee, David Ciucci, Luca Rubehn, Arne van Dam, Kellen Parker List, Johann-Mattis Computation and Language Multilingual wordlists play a crucial role in comparative linguistics. While many studies have been carried out to test the power of computational methods for language subgrouping or divergence time estimation, few studies have put the data upon which these studies are based to a rigorous test. Here, we conduct a first experiment that tests the robustness of concept translation as an integral part of the compilation of multilingual wordlists. Investigating the variation in concept translations in independently compiled wordlists from 10 dataset pairs covering 9 different language families, we find that on average, only 83% of all translations yield the same word form, while identical forms in terms of phonetic transcriptions can only be found in 23% of all cases. Our findings can prove important when trying to assess the uncertainty of phylogenetic studies and the conclusions derived from them. |
| title | Unstable Grounds for Beautiful Trees? Testing the Robustness of Concept Translations in the Compilation of Multilingual Wordlists |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00464 |