Thread by @TheGolgappa

Hey you Linguists -
If you are spending a large chunk of your time involved in
the language wars on Twitter - this article is for you!

Look what i found - A very interesting article on the evolution of South Indian languages.

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rs…

#language #linguist

In the research titled
"A Bayesian phylogenetic study of the Dravidian language family"
- researchers have tried to date the language using Bayesian analysis .
For those of you not aware - method of statistical inference in which Bayes' theorem is used to update

the probability for a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available.
It combines prior existing info with evidence from info in a sample to guide the statistical inference.

The study has some shortcomings
They have used the Swadesh 100 list

for the historica-linguistic comparison instead of the now widely used Swadesh 200.
The tree options could have been differennt and they could have used the Consensus tree too as pointed out in the comments.
Finally the dataset seems too small to arrive at such a conclusion.

Now another scientist - Taraka Rama of University of
Texas has reanalyzed the data presented in the study and
has countered certain findings of Kolipakam et al and is written in the link below

Do check out.
github.com/PhyloStar/drav…

Finally those who are very interested in the origin of Dravidian language can check out the book of
Bhadriraju Krishnamurthy titled 'The dravidian languages'

#dravidian #aryan #historical #indian