Beyond cognacy

ArXi:2507.03005v2 Announce Type: replace Computational phylogenetics has become an established tool in historical linguistics, with many language families now analyzed using likelihood-based inference. However, standard approaches rely on expert-annotated cognate sets, which are sparse, labor-intensive to produce, and limited to individual language families. This paper explores alternatives by comparing the established method to two fully automated methods that extract phylogenetic signal directly from lexical data.