On the Rate of Replacement of Word-Meaning Relationships
David Sankoff · Language · 1970
A method is proposed for quantitatively comparing word-meaning lists in related languages, taking into account synonymous lexical representations. This is applied to the Indo-European languages to estimate rates of change of lexical representation for more than a thousand meanings documented by Buck. Comparisons between the distribution of rates for the lexicostatistic test list and other meanings, and between the distributions calculated from Indo-European data and those from Malayo-Polynesian, suggest generalizations of lexicostatistic theory.