Lexicostatistic

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. A linguistic approach that quantitatively analyzes relationships between languages by comparing their lexicon focuses on vocabulary similarities and shared terms for evaluating linguistic evolution
2. A method that assesses the quantitative relationships among languages by examining their vocabulary similarities and shared linguistic elements to evaluate language evolution
3. This analytical approach involves comparing lexical items across languages to determine their similarities and shared characteristics for studying linguistic development

Etymology: "Lexicostatistic" is a modern technical coinage, built in English from two parts: "lexico-", from the Ancient Greek "lexikos", meaning "of words" (itself from "lexis", "speech" or "word", ultimately from "legein", "to say"), and "statistic", which traces back through the Latin "status" and the German "Statistik" to the idea of counting facts about a state. Joined together, the pieces describe counting the words of a language. The method behind the word was developed to compare languages that are related by descent. Researchers take a fixed list of basic vocabulary, such as body parts, numbers and common everyday objects, and measure how many items in that list match across languages. The more matches, the more closely related the languages are assumed to be, and the more recently they are thought to have separated from a common ancestor. The word is therefore a clear example of how scholars build new terms from classical parts when no existing word fits. Its most striking feature is how literal it is: each element names exactly what the method does, with no metaphor involved.