Indo-European Linguistics 3 (2015) 84–117 brill.com/ieul Borrowing, Character Weighting, and Preliminary Cluster Analysis in a Phylogenetic Analysis of the Ancient Greek Dialects* Christina Michelle Skelton Harvard Society of Fellows, Harvard University, Cambridge, ma, usa
[email protected] Abstract Phylogenetic systematics is an increasingly popular tool in historical linguistics for reconstructing the evolutionary histories of groups of languages. One problem in apply- ing phylogenetic methods to languages is that phylogenetic methods assume evolu- tion takes place strictly by descent with modification, whereas borrowing between languages is common. This paper tests two different methods for addressing bor- rowing in phylogenetic analysis of language on a dataset representing the dialects of ancient Greek: character weighting and preliminary cluster analysis. Both methods show promise; they correctly recovered the subgrouping of the Greek dialects and were able to improve the resolution of the tree compared to the preliminary analysis. How- ever, they recovered conflicting subgroupings of the West Greek dialects. This result is most likely due to a circular dialect continuum within West Greek. Using phylogenetic methods in situations which match their assumptions is crucial; for the West Greek dialects, phylogenetic network methods would be more appropriate. * The author would like to thank the editor, Ron Kim, and the two anonymous reviewers, as well as Randy Diehl, Andrew Garrett, Scott Kominers, Richard Meier, Craig Melchert, Johanna Nichols, Don Ringe, Ed Stabler, and Brent Vine for their comments. Walter Gilbert first suggested the idea of cluster analysis. Matthew Bufano, Matthew Elkins, and Rebecca Hale assisted with coding. A large part of this research was conducted at the Center for Hellenic Studies, and the author would like to thank everyone, but particularly Greg Nagy, for their support and hospitality.