Computational methods applied to big datasets are compelling tools for historical linguistics

Digital approaches applied to big data play an increasingly important role in the humanities. However, there is skepticism about the accuracy and potential of computational methods for historical linguistics. A key task is the identification of etymologically related words (cognates) with a common ancestor, such as stone in English and Stein in German. Up to now, cognate detection is exclusively carried out by trained historical linguists who manually examine big datasets. This could change rath