129 citations · 382 across the 40 of their papers we have counts for
8 papers · 1 filter
Stability of meanings versus rate of replacement of words: an experimental test
Michele Pasquini, Maurizio Serva
The words of a language are randomly replaced in time by new ones, but it has long been known that words corresponding to some items (meanings) are less frequently replaced than ot…
The settlement of Madagascar: what dialects and languages can tell
Maurizio Serva
The dialects of Madagascar belong to the Greater Barito East group of the Austronesian family and it is widely accepted that the Island was colonized by Indonesian sailors after a…
Phylogeny and geometry of languages from normalized Levenshtein distance
Maurizio Serva
The idea that the distance among pairs of languages can be evaluated from lexical differences seems to have its roots in the work of the French explorer Dumont D'Urville. He collec…
Malagasy Dialects and the Peopling of Madagascar
M. Serva, F. Petroni, D. Volchenkov +1
The origin of Malagasy DNA is half African and half Indonesian, nevertheless the Malagasy language, spoken by the entire population, belongs to the Austronesian family. The languag…
Measures of lexical distance between languages
Filippo Petroni, Maurizio Serva
The idea of measuring distance between languages seems to have its roots in the work of the French explorer Dumont D'Urville \cite{Urv}. He collected comparative words lists of var…
Lexical evolution rates by automated stability measure
Filippo Petroni, Maurizio Serva
Phylogenetic trees can be reconstructed from the matrix which contains the distances between all pairs of languages in a family. Recently, we proposed a new method which uses norma…