The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) is a collaborative project applying computational approaches to

comparative linguistics Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness. Genetic relatedness implies a common origin or proto-language and comparative linguistics aim ...

using a database of word lists. The database is open access and consists of 40-item basic-vocabulary lists for well over half of the world's languages. It is continuously being expanded. In addition to isolates and languages of demonstrated genealogical groups, the database includes

pidgins A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified form of contact language that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn fro ...

, creoles,

mixed languages A mixed language, also referred to as a hybrid language or fusion language, is a type of contact language that arises among a bilingual group combining aspects of two or more languages but not clearly deriving primarily from any single language. ...

, and

constructed languages A constructed language (shortened to conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, orthography, and vocabulary, instead of having developed natural language, naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devise ...

. Words of the database are transcribed into a simplified standard orthography (ASJPcode). The database has been used to estimate dates at which language families have diverged into daughter languages by a method related to but still different from

glottochronology Glottochronology (from Attic Greek γλῶττα ''tongue, language'' and χρόνος ''time'') is the part of lexicostatistics which involves comparative linguistics and deals with the chronological relationship between languages.Sheila Embleton ...

, to determine the homeland (

Urheimat In historical linguistics, the homeland or ( , from German 'original' and 'home') of a proto-language is the region in which it was spoken before splitting into different daughter languages. A proto-language is the reconstructed or historicall ...

) of a

proto-language In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unatte ...

, to investigate

sound symbolism In linguistics, sound symbolism is the perceptual similarity between speech sounds and concept meanings. It is a form of linguistic iconicity. For example, the English word ''ding'' may sound similar to the actual sound of a bell. Linguistic ...

, to evaluate different phylogenetic methods, and several other purposes. ASJP is not widely accepted among historical linguists as an adequate method to establish or evaluate relationships between language families. It is part of the Cross-Linguistic Linked Data project hosted by the

Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History The Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology () performs fundamental research into archaeological science. The institute is one of more than 80 research institutes of the Max Planck Society and is located in Jena, Germany. History Max Planc ...

History

Original goals

ASJP was originally developed as a means for objectively evaluating the similarity of words with the same meaning from different languages, with the ultimate goal of classifying languages computationally, based on the lexical similarities observed. In the first ASJP paper two semantically identical words from compared languages were judged similar if they showed at least two identical sound segments. Similarity between the two languages was calculated as a percentage of the total number of words compared that were judged as similar. This method was applied to 100-item word lists for 250 languages from

language families A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term ''family'' is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics ana ...

including

Austroasiatic The Austroasiatic languages ( ) are a large language family spoken throughout Mainland Southeast Asia, South Asia and East Asia. These languages are natively spoken by the majority of the population in Vietnam and Cambodia, and by minority popu ...

Indo-European The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and the Iranian plateau with additional native branches found in regions such as Sri Lanka, the Maldives, parts of Central Asia (e. ...

, Mayan, and

Muskogean Muskogean ( ; also Muskhogean) is a language family spoken in the Southeastern United States. Members of the family are Indigenous Languages of the Americas. Typologically, Muskogean languages are highly synthetic and agglutinative. One docume ...

ASJP Consortium

The ASJP Consortium, founded around 2008, came to involve around 25 professional linguists and other interested parties working as volunteer transcribers and/or extending aid to the project in other ways. The main driving force behind the founding of the consortium was Cecil H. Brown.

Søren Wichmann Søren Wichmann (born 1964) is a Danish linguist specializing in historical linguistics, linguistic typology, Mesoamerican languages, and epigraphy. Since June 2016, he has been employed as a University Lecturer at Leiden University Centre for L ...

is daily curator of the project. A third central member of the consortium is Eric W. Holman, who has created most of the software used in the project.

Shorter word lists

While word lists used were originally based on the 100-item

Swadesh list A Swadesh list () is a compilation of cultural universal, tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. That is, a Swadesh list is a list of forms and concepts which all languages, without exception, have terms for, such as ...

, it was statistically determined that a subset of 40 of the 100 items produced just as good if not slightly better classificatory results than the whole list. So subsequently word lists gathered contain only 40 items (or less, when attestations for some are lacking).

Levenshtein distance

In papers published since 2008, ASJP has employed a similarity judgment program based on Levenshtein distance (LD). This approach was found to produce better classificatory results measured against expert opinion than the method used initially. LD is defined as the minimum number of successive changes necessary to convert one word into another, where each change is the insertion, deletion, or substitution of a symbol. Within the Levenshtein approach, differences in word length can be corrected for by dividing LD by the number of symbols of the longer of the two compared words. This produces normalized LD (LDN). An LDN divided (LDND) between the two languages is calculated by dividing the average LDN for all the word pairs involving the same meaning by the average LDN for all the word pairs involving different meanings. This second normalization is intended to correct for chance similarity.

Word list

The ASJP uses the following 40-word list. It is similar to the Swadesh–Yakhontov list, but has some differences. ;Body parts *eye *ear *nose *tongue *tooth *hand *knee *blood *bone *breast (woman’s) *liver *skin ;Animals and plants *louse *dog *fish (noun) *horn (animal part) *tree *leaf ;People *person *name (noun) ;Nature *sun *star *water *fire *stone *path *mountain *night (dark time) ;Verbs and adjectives *drink (verb) *die *see *hear *come *new *full ;Numerals and pronouns *one *two *I *you *we

ASJPcode

ASJP version from 2016 uses the following symbols to encode

phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

s: p b f v m w 8 t d s z c n r l S Z C j T 5 y k g x N q X h 7 L 4 G ! i e E 3 a u o They represent 7 vowels and 34 consonants, all found on the standard QWERTY keyboard. A mark follows two consonants so that they are considered to be in the same position. Thus, becomes . Syllables like , , and are considered lexically similar to . Similarly, a mark follows three consonants so that they are considered to be in the same position. is considered similar to , and . marks the preceding consonant as

glottalized Glottalization is the complete or partial closure of the glottis during the articulation of another sound. Glottalization of vowels and other sonorants is most often realized as creaky voice (partial closure). Glottalization of obstruent conso ...

References

Sources

*Søren Wichmann, Jeff Good (eds). 2014
Quantifying Language Dynamics: On the Cutting edge of Areal and Phylogenetic Linguistics
p. 203. Leiden: Brill. *Brown, Cecil H., et al. 2008
Automated Classification of the World's Languages: A Description of the Method and Preliminary Results
Language Typology and Universals 61(4). November 2008. *Wichmann, Søren, Eric W. Holman, and Cecil H. Brown (eds.). 2018
The ASJP Database
(version 18).

External links

ASJP Database
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