Phylogenetic Inference of the Tibeto-Burman Languages Or on the Usefulness of Lexicostatistics (and "megalo"-comparison) for the Subgrouping of Tibeto-Burman

Book excerpt: It has been argued that lexicostatistical methods cannot be fruitfully applied to the Tibeto-Burman (or the larger Sino-Tibetan) language family. This dissertation first develops a statistical method for determining linguistic cognates (or sound correspondences) between arbitrarily many languages. This method is then applied to a subset of the Sino-Tibetan languages to infer the correspondences and further develops a method for lexicostatistical analysis for subgrouping those languages. The output of these methods agrees very well with that determined by the traditional comparative method. Furthermore, this method yields both greater resolution of the subgroupings, and provides statistical inference of the confidence in the various groupings.