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Fig. 5 | Biology Direct

Fig. 5

From: Unity and disunity in evolutionary sciences: process-based analogies open common research avenues for biology and linguistics

Fig. 5

Similarity networks applied to linguistic data. a Similarity networks are reconstructed from global alignments for words meaning ‘person’ in Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages (data taken from [101]). Five large connected components are identified. While three of them are homogeneous regarding the language family and show true cognate sets common in the respective branch of Indo-European, the top-left cluster contains words from all three branches. This cluster mainly shows Romance reflexes of Latin persona ‘person’. Slavic and Germanic words occurring in this cluster are all borrowed. b Similarity networks are reconstructed from local alignments for dialect words meaning ‘face’ in 20 Chinese dialect varieties (data taken from [132]). The data contains three variants, two simple words liǎn and mián, two words of different origin, and one fused form liǎn-mián. Numbers in the alignment reflect tone patterns, which are characteristic for South-East Asian languages. Edges colored in black differ in their local and global alignments, edges colored in gray show identical alignments for local and global analyses. The fused form serves as a hub connecting the two components. Data and code to reproduce the networks is available from the data and material accompanying this article (Additional file 1)

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