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Random causes with directed effects: the Indo-European language spread and the stochastic loss of lineages
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2015
Extract
Since the beginning, studies of Indo-European have seen it as a large phenomenon necessarily having a large, usually single cause. Yet apparent pattern can arise from chance causes that need have no great historical order. In a minimalist view, set out here as a theoretical hypothesis, the pattern of Indo-European can simply arise from a kind of social Brownian motion, in which a large pattern invents itself out of countless little perturbations between adjacent language communities
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- Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 1991
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