Based on a recently published large-scale lexicostatistical database, we rank 1,016 concepts by their suitability for inclusion in Swadesh-style lists of basic stable concepts. For this, we define separate measures of basicness and stability. Basicness in the sense of morphological simplicity is measured based on information content, a generalization of word length which corrects for distorting effects of phoneme inventory sizes, phonotactics and non-stem morphemes in dictionary forms. Stability against replacement by semantic shift or borrowing is measured by sampling independent language pairs, and correlating the distances between the forms for the concept with the overall language distances. In order to determine the relative importance of basicness and stability, we optimize our combination of the two partial measures towards similarity with existing lists. A comparison with and among existing rankings suggests that concept rankings are highly data-dependent and therefore less well-grounded than previously assumed. To explore this issue, we evaluate the robustness of our ranking against language pair resampling, allowing us to assess how much volatility can be expected, and showing that only about half of the concepts on a list based on our ranking can safely be assumed to belong on the list independently of the data.

基于最近发布的大型词汇统计数据库，我们对1,016个概念进行了排序，以将它们包含在基本稳定概念的Swadesh样式列表中。为此，我们定义了基本性和稳定性的单独度量。形态简单意义上的基本性是基于信息内容来衡量的，该信息内容是对单词长度的概括，它纠正了音素库大小，音位和非词素语素在字典形式中的失真影响。通过对独立的语言对进行采样，并将概念形式之间的距离与总体语言距离相关联，来衡量防止语义转移或借用替换的稳定性。为了确定基本性和稳定性的相对重要性，我们优化了两个部分指标的组合，以使其与现有列表相似。与现有排名进行比较，可以发现概念排名与数据高度相关，因此与以前的假设相比，扎实的基础不足。为了探究这个问题，我们评估了排名对语言对重采样的稳健性，从而使我们能够评估预期的波动性，并表明基于排名我们列表中只有大约一半的概念可以安全地假定属于在列表上与数据无关。