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Using Historical Glottometry to Subgroup the Early Germanic Languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2021

Joshua R. Agee
Joshua R. Agee*
Affiliation:
San Jose State University
*
600 Marathon Dr. Apt. 4 Campbell, CA 95008 USA [joshagee@hotmail.com]
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Abstract

Historical Glottometry, introduced by Kalyan & François (2018), is a wave-based quantitative approach to language subgrouping used to calculate the overall strength of a linguistic subgroup using metrics that capture the contributions of linguistic innovations of various scopes to language diversification, in consideration of the reality of their distributions. This approach primarily achieves this by acknowledging the contribution of postsplit areal diffusion to language diversification, which has traditionally been overlooked in cladistic (tree-based) models. In this paper, the development of the Germanic language family, from the breakup of Proto-Germanic to the latest period of the early attested daughter languages (namely, Old English, Old Frisian, Gothic, Old High German, Old Low Franconian, Old Norse, and Old Saxon) is accounted for using Historical Glottometry. It is shown that this approach succeeds in accounting for several smaller, nontraditional subgroups of Germanic by accommodating the linguistic evidence unproblematically where a cladistic approach would fail.

Keywords

Historical GlottometryProto-GermanicsubgroupingWest GermanicNorthwest Germanic
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 319 - 357
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Copyright
© Society for Germanic Linguistics 2021

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