%0 Journal Article
%A Bodt, Timotheus A.
%A List, Johann-Mattis
%+ CALC, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Max Planck Society
%T Testing the predictive strength of the comparative method: An ongoing experiment on unattested words in Western Kho‐Bwa languages  : 
%G eng
%U https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0009-027F-7
%R 10.2218/pihph.4.2019.3037 
%D 2019
%8 20.06.2019
%* Review method: peer-reviewed
%X Although it is well-known to most historical linguists that the comparative<br>method could in principle be used to predict hitherto unobserved words in<br>genetically related languages, the task of word prediction is rarely discussed<br>in the linguistic literature. Here, we introduce ‘reflex retrodiction’ as a<br>new task for historical linguistics and report an ongoing experiment in<br>which we use a computer-assisted workflow to retrodict reflexes for so far<br>unobserved words in eight varieties of Western Kho-Bwa (a subgroup of<br>Sino-Tibetan). Since, at the time of writing this report, the experiment is still<br>ongoing, we do not report concrete results, but instead provide an estimate<br>of our expectations by testing the performance of the computational part<br>of our workflow on existing language data. Our results suggest that reflex<br>retrodiction has the potential of becoming a useful tool for historically<br>oriented fieldwork.
%K Kho-Bwa languages, correspondence patterns, prediction
%J Papers in Historical Phonology
%V 4
%& 22
%P 22 - 44
%I University of Edinburgh 
%C Edinburgh
%@ 2399-6714
%U https://osf.io/evcbp/