Automated languages phylogeny from Levenshtein distance

In order to verify hypotheses concerning relationship between two languages it is necessary to define evaluate their distance from lexical differences. This concept seems to have its roots in the work of the French explorer Dumont D'Urville. He collected comparative words lists of various languages during his voyages aboard the Astrolabe from 1826 to 1829 and, in his work about the geographical division of the Pacific, he proposed a method to measure the degree of relation among languages. The method used by modern glottochronology, developed by Morris Swadesh in the 1950s, measures distances from the percentage of shared cognates, which are words with a common historical origin. Recently, we proposed a new automated method which has some advantages: the first is that it avoids subjectivity, the second is that results can be replicated by other scholars assuming that the database is the same, the third is that no specific linguistic knowledge is requested, and the last, but surely not the least, is that it allows for rapid comparison of a very large number of languages. We applied our method to the Indo-European and to the Austronesian groups considering, in both cases, fifty different languages and we obtained two genealogical trees using the Unweighted Pair Group Method Average. The trees are similar to those found by previous research with some important differences concerning the position of few languages and subgroups. Indeed, we think that these differences carry some fresh information about the structure of the tree and about the phylogenetic relations inside the families.