arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to F. Welington S. Lima.
Thousands of different forms (words) are associated with thousands of different meanings (concepts) in a language computer model. Reasonable agreement with reality is found for the number of languages in a family and the Hamming distances between languages.
This paper presents the results of the application of a bit-string model of languages (Schulze and Stauffer 2005) to problems of taxonomic patterns. The questions addressed include the following: (1) Which parameters are minimally ne eded for the development of a taxonomic dynamics leading to the type of distribution of language family sizes currently attested (as measured in the i number of languages per family), which appears to be a power-law? (2) How may such a model be coupled with one of the dynamics of speaker populations leading to the type of language size seen today, which appears to follow a log-normal distribution?