Uto-Aztecan subgrouping has long been the subject of debate. We aim to establish a more up-to-date foundation for Uto-Aztecan lexicostatistics by reexamining Wick Miller’s influential lexicostatistic classification. Miller’s cognate density measure yields a symmetrical table based on the number of cognates each language pairing shares on a modified Swadesh-100 wordlist. However, no language has cognate sets for all word meanings (glosses) on that list. We offer an improved metric, relative cognate density, for analyzing an updated database of Kenneth Hill’s Uto-Aztecan cognate sets. We generate an asymmetrical table dividing the number of pairwise shared cognates (“match counts”) by the number of cognate sets each comparison language actually has available. Employing more standard distance-based clustering algorithms (UPGMA, Neighbor Joining, and NeighborNet), our results align with Miller’s in some respects (e.g., in identifying a Southern-Uto-Aztecan branch but not a Northern-Uto-Aztecan one) but differ in others (e.g., in not identifying “Sonoran”).

中文翻译：

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Uto-Aztecan Lexicostatistics 2.0

Uto-Aztecan 亚群长期以来一直是争论的主题。我们的目标是通过重新检查 Wick Miller 有影响力的词法统计分类，为 Uto-Aztecan 词法统计建立一个更新的基础。Miller 的同源密度度量基于每个语言对在修改后的 Swadesh-100 词表上共享的同源词数量生成一个对称表。但是，没有任何语言对该列表中的所有词义（词汇）都有同源集。我们提供了一种改进的度量，即相对同源密度，用于分析 Kenneth Hill 的 Uto-Aztecan 同源集的更新数据库。我们生成了一个非对称表，将成对共享的同源词（“匹配计数”）的数量除以每种比较语言实际可用的同源词集的数量。采用更标准的基于距离的聚类算法（UPGMA、Neighbor Joining、