This book provides a computational re-evaluation of the genealogical relations between the early Germanic families and of their diversification from their most recent common ancestor, Proto-Germanic. It also proposes a novel computational approach to the problem of linguistic diversification more broadly, using a computational simulation algorithm.

Frederik Hartmann is an assistant professor at the University of North Texas. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Konstanz, where he completed his PhD in 2021, and the University of Tübingen. His main research interests are the computational and quantitative analysis of historical phonology and linguistic relationships, with a specific focus on German. He is the author of The Vandalic Languages: Origins and Relationships (Winter, 2020) and of articles in Lingua, Journal of Language Evolution, and Indo-European Linguistics.

• Series preface


• Acknowledgements


• Preface


• List of figures


• List of tables


• 1: Introduction


• 2: Data


• 3: Tree-based phylogenetics


• 4: A wave model implementation


• 5: Genealogical implications and Germanic phylogeny


• 6: Computational tree and wave models: Final remarks


• Appendix


• References


• Index