TY  - CHAP
AU  - Wichmann, Søren
AU  - Holman, Eric W.
ED  - Saxena, Anju
ED  - Borin, Lars
AB  - The findings to be presented in this paper were not anticipated, but came about as an unexpected result of looking at how the application of a version of the Levenshtein distance to word lists compares with cognate counting. We were interested in the degree to which the two correlate. The results of this investigation are intrinsically interesting and will be presented in the following section 2, but even more interesting is our finding that differences between counting cognates and measuring the Levenshtein distances vary as a function of average word lengths in the word lists compared. This observation will occupy the remainder of the paper, with section 3 devoted to establishing the statistical significance of the observation across language families, while section 4 establishes the significance within language groups, and section 5 discusses competing explanations. First we briefly explain the specific version of the Levenshtein distance used and the concept of cognate identification.
DO  - 10.1515/9783110305258.249
ID  - OAPEN ID: 1006431
ID  - OAPEN ID: OCN: 1135849104
KW  - Linguistic differences
L1  - https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/3d070e18-e43b-4e70-ba78-40573550fffe/59_[9783110305258 - Approaches] Languages.pdf
LA  - English
LK  - http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/23713
PB  - De Gruyter
PP  - Berlin/Boston
PY  - 2013
SN  - 9783110488081
TI  - Chapter Languages with longer words have more lexical changenull
ER  - 
