This cumulative thesis is based on three separate projects based on a computer-assisted language comparison (CALC) framework to address common obstacles to studying the history of Mainland Southeast Asian (MSEA) languages, such as sparse and non-standardized lexical data, as well as an inadequate method…
The proposal of new quantitative methods supposed to handle problems in historical linguistics has created a gap between what one could call “classical” approaches to historical language comparison and the “new and innovative” automatic approaches. Classical linguists are often skeptical of the new approaches,…