Phylogenetics of Indo-European Language families via an Algebro-Geometric Analysis of their Syntactic Structures

TL;DR

This paper applies algebraic geometry techniques to analyze the evolutionary relationships among Indo-European languages based on syntactic data, providing a computational approach to historical linguistics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel algebraic geometric method to infer phylogenetic trees from syntactic structures of Indo-European languages.

Findings

Successful computation of phylogenetic invariants and likelihoods for language subfamilies

Results align with established historical linguistics knowledge

Demonstrates the effectiveness of algebraic methods in linguistic phylogenetics

Abstract

Using Phylogenetic Algebraic Geometry, we analyze computationally the phylogenetic tree of subfamilies of the Indo-European language family, using data of syntactic structures. The two main sources of syntactic data are the SSWL database and Longobardi's recent data of syntactic parameters. We compute phylogenetic invariants and likelihood functions for two sets of Germanic languages, a set of Romance languages, a set of Slavic languages and a set of early Indo-European languages, and we compare the results with what is known through historical linguistics.