Correction: ‘The deep history of the number words’ (2018), by Pagel and Meade

Abstract

Full text

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 373, 20160517. (Published online 01 January 2018). (http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0517)

There were slight errors in one of the published rates and two of the standard deviations in table 1 of this paper and to the content and rank ordering in table 2 of the Austronesian meanings with the slowest rates of lexical replacement. None of these errors affects any of the statistics or conclusions of the paper.

The corrected table 1 is shown here with the corrected values in bold face.

The corrected table 2 is also shown. Only the Austronesian rank ordering is affected. As we originally found, the meanings ‘two’, ‘three’, ‘four’ and ‘five’ still appear among the slowest 11 and so the probability calculations that we reported in the original article still apply. The meanings ‘to pound/beat’ and ‘child’ are no longer among the 11 slowest; the latter’s mention in the Discussion section of the original article no longer applies.

We also point out that the estimated rates for ‘two’, ‘three’, ‘five’ and ‘who’ in Indo-European are numerically equal and so should be considered as tied. This does not affect the probability calculations for the low-limit number words reported in the original text. Their ordering in table 2 reflects our previous finding [1] that number words as a part of speech have slower rates of lexical replacement on average than pronouns.

The word ‘fifty’ has the sixth slowest rate of lexical replacement in Austronesian but it is likely to be a much later borrowing that has been adopted in many languages. For example, it has the fewest number of cognate states in the Austronesian data and by some margin (see see supplementary information to the original article). Excluding ‘fifty’, ‘blood’ becomes the 11th slowest and none of our probability calculations is changed.