Lexicostatistics and the New Indo-Aryan languages: a field linguist''s perspective
In this paper, I present certain comments, objections, and addenda to Anton Kogan's article «Genealogical classification of New Indo-Aryan languages and lexicostatistics», published last year in the Journal of Language Relationship (14/4: 227-258). In particular, I introduce several tentative corrections to the Swadesh lists that were compiled by Kogan, based on the data of historical phonetics and semantics of the Indo-Aryan languages in general. I also analyze in detail the lists for four languages (Hindi, Odia, Bengali, and Kullui), comparing them with my own fieldwork data as well as data from other dictionaries and text corpora.Upon correcting the lists, I compare the resulting genealogical trees (generated by StarLing software) based on original and corrected lexicostatistical matrices. Although the differences are not highly significant, they nevertheless improve upon the validity of the results and demonstrate that further correction of the lists can increase the resulting tree's degree of accuracy.