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Title: Detecting regular sound changes in linguistics as events of concerted evolution

Journal Article · · Current Biology
 [1];  [2];  [3];  [4];  [2];  [5];  [6]
  1. Arizona State Univ., Tempe, AZ (United States)
  2. Univ. of Reading, Reading (United Kingdom)
  3. The Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM (United States); George Mason Univ., Fairfax, VA (United States). Krasnow Inst. for Advanced Study
  4. The Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM (United States); Ronin Inst., Montclair, NJ (United States)
  5. Univ. of Reading, Reading (United Kingdom); The Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM (United States)
  6. The Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM (United States); Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)

Background: Concerted evolution is normally used to describe parallel changes at different sites in a genome, but it is also observed in languages where a specific phoneme changes to the same other phoneme in many words in the lexicon—a phenomenon known as regular sound change. We develop a general statistical model that can detect concerted changes in aligned sequence data and apply it to study regular sound changes in the Turkic language family. Results: Linguistic evolution, unlike the genetic substitutional process, is dominated by events of concerted evolutionary change. Our model identified more than 70 historical events of regular sound change that occurred throughout the evolution of the Turkic language family, while simultaneously inferring a dated phylogenetic tree. Including regular sound changes yielded an approximately 4-fold improvement in the characterization of linguistic change over a simpler model of sporadic change, improved phylogenetic inference, and returned more reliable and plausible dates for events on the phylogenies. The historical timings of the concerted changes closely follow a Poisson process model, and the sound transition networks derived from our model mirror linguistic expectations. Conclusions: We demonstrate that a model with no prior knowledge of complex concerted or regular changes can nevertheless infer the historical timings and genealogical placements of events of concerted change from the signals left in contemporary data. Our model can be applied wherever discrete elements—such as genes, words, cultural trends, technologies, or morphological traits—can change in parallel within an organism or other evolving group.

Research Organization:
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
Grant/Contract Number:
AC52-06NA25396
OSTI ID:
1201752
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1234707
Report Number(s):
LA-UR-14-29463; PII: S0960982214013736
Journal Information:
Current Biology, Vol. 25, Issue 1; ISSN 0960-9822
Publisher:
ElsevierCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 22 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Multiple C2 domains and transmembrane region proteins (MCTPs) tether membranes at plasmodesmata. text January 2019
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How Many Is Enough?—Statistical Principles for Lexicostatistics journal December 2016
Darwinian perspectives on the evolution of human languages journal July 2016
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