ABSTRACT
Ancient population movements and cultural transformations have left us with a fascinating legacy of archaeological, genetic, and linguistic data. Traditionally, the most popular means of extracting diachronic information from linguistic data has been the "comparative method," which groups languages through knowledge of current and historically attested language syntax, word form, and phonology. The comparative method provides two useful sources of historical information. First, the inferred family tree reveals major language groupings and the relative chronology of divergence events. A second source of information lies in an approach known as "linguistic paleontology." Indeed, the negative sentiment surrounding glottochronology is so strong that many have abandoned any attempt to date language divergence using linguistic data. Biologists, like linguists, are interested in the dates associated with nodes on evolutionary trees, and both encounter similar problems when estimating divergence times and time depth. Distance-based tree-building methods result in information loss in biology just as they do in linguistics.
