of interest, we get a small vocabulary list of common, basic words (typically
Another approach, pioneered by the American Structuralist linguist Morris
Swadesh, is called lexicostatistics. For a set of languages
of interest, we get a small vocabulary list of common, basic words (typically
100-200 items). For each pair of languages, we determine the percentage
of words on this list that appear to be cognate. Determination of cognation
is dependent on the subjective judgment of the linguist, and we expect
some errors, especially if the scholar does not know the languages very
well, but we hope that the error rate will be small enough not to affect
the results.