On computational historical linguistics in the 21st century

Abstract

We welcome Gerhard Jäger’s framing of Computational Historical Linguistics: its history and background, its goals and ambitions as well as the concrete implementation by Jäger himself. As Jäger explains (pp. 151–153), the comparative method can be broken down into seven steps and there have been attempts to formalise/automatise (some of) the steps since the 1950s. However, Jäger contrasts the work in the 1960–2000s on various steps as “mostly constituting isolated efforts” and, in contrast, characterises the biologically inspired work of the 2000s as a “major impetus”. It is difficult to find the motivation for this division as the latter group, like the former, also concern themselves with only a subpart of the comparative method and, furthermore, rely fundamentally on subjective cognate judgments done by humans (as also acknowledged by Jäger later, pp. 156–157).