Tag Archives: interdisciplinary research

Biological metaphors and methods in historical linguistics (1): Introduction

Evolutionary biology and historical linguistics share a long history of scientific exchange, reflected both not only in the sharing and transfer of metaphors but more recently also in the transfer of methods. Already Charles Darwin claimed that both species and languages evolve in tree-like patterns, and linguists, like Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, used terms like “sprachliche[n] Biologie” (‘linguistic biology’) when referring to the history of languages (Meyer-Lübke 1890, x). While the discipline of historical-comparative linguistics allowed biologists to adopt evolutionary thought against religious dogma in the late 19th century (Wells 1987: 54), it was biological applications which opened up the possibility of large quantitative studies in linguistics based on computational approaches (Geisler and List 2013, 111).

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