Short, Frequent Words Are More Likely To Appear Genetically Related By Chance, (Vol 110, Pg E3253, 2013)

An important question in historical linguistics is whether deep genetic relationships exist across language families. Although specific families can be reconstructed back to around 6,000 y ago, Pagel et al. (1) claim that seven Eurasian families arose from a common ancestor 15,000 y ago. Pagel et al. develop a phylogenetic model, starting with a subset of the Swadesh basic word list for seven language families in the Languages of the World Etymological Database, which lists reconstructed proto-words and cognates. Because these reconstructions are potentially unreliable, Pagel et al. treat each reconstructed cognate pair as a binary random variable. They find a robust correlation …