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A New Method for Computational Cladistics: An Afro‐Asiatic Case Study
Author(s) -
Bacovcin Hezekiah Akiva,
Wilson David
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
transactions of the philological society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.333
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-968X
pISSN - 0079-1636
DOI - 10.1111/1467-968x.12128
Subject(s) - cladistics , semitic languages , maximum parsimony , tree (set theory) , computer science , phylogenetic tree , mathematics , linguistics , biology , philosophy , combinatorics , arabic , clade , biochemistry , gene
This paper makes two contributions. First, we introduce a new method for computational cladistics that produces a rooted tree by minimising the number of homoplasies. This method is compared with lexicostatistics and maximum parsimony. We validate the method on Indo‐European data and show that the tree derived is consistent with current understanding of the internal cladistics of that family. Secondly, we turn the method to treat the less well studied problem of the internal cladistics of Afro‐Asiatic. We show that there is good evidence for a North/South division in Afro‐Asiatic with Berber, Egyptian and Semitic in the North and Chadic, Cushitic and Omotic in the South. There is also tentative evidence for further grouping of Egyptian with Semitic and Cushitic with Omotic.