Language is one of the most complex of human traits. There are many hypotheses about how it originated, what factors shaped its diversity, and what ongoing processes drive how it changes. We present the Causal Hypotheses in Evolutionary Linguistics Database (CHIELD, https://chield.excd.org/), a tool for expressing, exploring, and evaluating hypotheses. It allows researchers to integrate multiple theories into a coherent narrative, helping to design future research. We present design goals, a formal specification, and an implementation for this database. Source code is freely available for other fields to take advantage of this tool. Some initial results are presented, including identifying conflicts in theories about gossip and ritual, comparing hypotheses relating population size and morphological complexity, and an author relation network.

中文翻译：

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CHIELD：进化语言学数据库中的因果假设

语言是人类最复杂的特征之一。关于它是如何起源的，是什么因素塑造了它的多样性，以及哪些正在进行的过程驱动了它的变化，有很多假设。我们介绍了进化语言学数据库（CHIELD，https://chield.excd.org/）中的因果假设，这是一种表达、探索和评估假设的工具。它允许研究人员将多种理论整合到一个连贯的叙述中，帮助设计未来的研究。我们提出了该数据库的设计目标、​​正式规范和实现。源代码可免费用于其他领域以利用此工具。提出了一些初步结果，包括识别关于八卦和仪式的理论冲突，比较有关人口规模和形态复杂性的假设，以及作者关系网络。