Phylogenetics
Outside biology

Phylogenetic tools and representations (trees and networks) can also be applied to philology, the study of the evolution of oral languages and written text and manuscripts, such as in the field of quantitative comparative linguistics.

Computational phylogenetics can be used to investigate a language as an evolutionary system. The evolution of human language closely corresponds with human's biological evolution which allows phylogenetic methods to be applied. The concept of a "tree" serves as an efficient way to represent relationships between languages and language splits. It also serves as a way of testing hypotheses about the connections and ages of language families. For example, relationships among languages can be shown by using cognates as characters. The phylogenetic tree of Indo-European languages shows the relationships between several of the languages in a timeline, as well as the similarity between words and word order.

There are three types of criticisms about using phylogenetics in philology, the first arguing that languages and species are different entities, therefore you can not use the same methods to study both. The second being how phylogenetic methods are being applied to linguistic data. And the third, discusses the types of data that is being used to construct the trees.

Bayesian phylogenetic methods, which are sensitive to how treelike the data is, allow for the reconstruction of relationships among languages, locally and globally. The main two reasons for the use of Bayesian phylogenetics are that (1) diverse scenarios can be included in calculations and (2) the output is a sample of trees and not a single tree with true claim.

The same process can be applied to texts and manuscripts. In Paleography, the study of historical writings and manuscripts, texts were replicated by scribes who copied from their source and alterations - i.e., 'mutations' - occurred when the scribe did not precisely copy the source.
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