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. 2013 Feb 11;110(11):4224–4229. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1204678110

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Fig. 3. — Increasing the number of languages we can reconstruct gives new ways to approach questions in historical linguistics, such as the effect of functional load on the probability of merging two sounds. The plots shown are heat maps where the color encodes the log of the number of sound changes that fall into a given two-dimensional bin. Each sound change x > y is encoded as a pair of numbers in the unit square, , as explained in Materials and Methods. To convey the amount of noise one could expect from a study with the number of languages that King previously used (7), we first show in A the heat map visualization for four languages. Next, we show the same plot for 637 Austronesian languages in B. Only in this latter setup is structure clearly visible: Most of the points with high probability of merging can be seen to have comparatively low functional load, providing evidence in favor of the functional load hypothesis introduced in 1955. See SI Appendix, Section 2.4 for details.

Inline graphic — Increasing the number of languages we can reconstruct gives new ways to approach questions in historical linguistics, such as the effect of functional load on the probability of merging two sounds. The plots shown are heat maps where the color encodes the log of the number of sound changes that fall into a given two-dimensional bin. Each sound change x > y is encoded as a pair of numbers in the unit square, , as explained in Materials and Methods. To convey the amount of noise one could expect from a study with the number of languages that King previously used (7), we first show in A the heat map visualization for four languages. Next, we show the same plot for 637 Austronesian languages in B. Only in this latter setup is structure clearly visible: Most of the points with high probability of merging can be seen to have comparatively low functional load, providing evidence in favor of the functional load hypothesis introduced in 1955. See SI Appendix, Section 2.4 for details.