Stats from database

I recently updated my Pama-Nyungan database to show some summary stats. Here are the subgroups with the most data points:
Warluwaric    8011
Thura-Yura    8107
Maric    8690
Marrngu    13038
Paman    13410
Ngumpin-Yapa    13943
Karnic    19972
Yolŋu    23923
So far, there are 3607 reconstructions. Yolŋu again leads, with 807, and Karnic is second. However, about 1/3 of the reconstructions haven’t yet been labelled with a subgroup [...]

Guest post: Barry Alpher on Geoff O’Grady

[Here is a guest post from Barry Alpher in remembrance of Geoff. See also the ELAC blog for more updates.]
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Geoff O’Grady sent me an offprint of his 1966 paper on Proto-Ngayarda not long after I had returned, late in 1967, from fieldwork in western CYP. At the time I was enthusiastically working through Ken Hale’s [...]

New book on syntactic reconstruction

A new book is out on syntactic reconstruction. I’ve got an article in it on some of the differences between phonological and syntactic approaches to reconstruction. Enjoy!

This is a collection of state-of-the-art papers in the field of syntactic reconstruction. It treats a range of topics which are representative of current debates in historical syntax. The [...]

Google Earth Phylogenetics

I’ve been looking for a way to integrate the trees (and networks) I’ve been working on for Karnic with geographic data. I was talking to Russell Gray about this and he mentioned some tools for doing this using Google Earth, and a bit of hunting produced Mesquite and its Cartographer addon. I must say that [...]

Databases

Now we’ve been going with the Pama-Nyungan comparative database for about a year, it’s time to take stock with what we have, what’s worked, and what hasn’t.
What’s worked?

Searching: it’s easy to search for items but all manner of different things.
… which means it’s reasonably easy to find and tag cognates.
Data entry is also pretty [...]

More on MDS

I meant to post some more on the MDS diagram and NNet from the last day or two.
First up, here’s a map of the Lake Eyre Basin, the area where Karnic languages were spoken.
The map doesn’t have quite all the varieties I used in my dataset. Nhirrpi is in the SE corner of the area [...]

More on Karnic

The MDS data from the previous post came from some work with NNets and a large Karnic sample. Today’s job is to generate the networks with different semantic fields (I did an earlier version of this with a data set half the size). Enjoy!