Table of contents

Chapters in this book

1. Prelim pages i
2. Table of contents v
3. Preface vii
4. Swadesh’s life and place in linguistics 1
5. A full-scale test of the language farming dispersal hypothesis 7
6. Do languages originate and become extinct at constant rates? 23
7. Borrowability and the notion of basic vocabulary 35
8. Homelands of the world’s language families 57
9. On using qualitative lexicostatistics to illuminate language history 87
10. Beyond lexicostatistics 113
11. Phonetic comparison, varieties, and networks 139
12. A stochastic local search approach to language tree reconstruction 155
13. Author index 173
14. Index of languages and language groups 177
15. Subject index 181