Here we present BDPROTO, a database comprised of phonological inventory data from 137 ancient and reconstructed languages. These data were extracted from historical linguistic reconstructions and brought together into a single unified, normalized, accessible, and Unicode-compliant language resource. This dataset is publicly available and we aim to engage language scientists doing research on language change and language evolution. We provide a short case study to highlight BDPROTO's research viability; using phylogenetic comparative methods and high-resolution language family trees, we investigate whether consonantal and vocalic systems differ in their rates of change over the last 10,000 years.
@InProceedings{MARSICO18.534, author = {Egidio Marsico and Sebastien Flavier and Annemarie Verkerk and Steven Moran}, title = "{BDPROTO: A Database of Phonological Inventories from Ancient and Reconstructed Languages}", booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {May 7-12, 2018}, address = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference chair) and Khalid Choukri and Christopher Cieri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Koiti Hasida and Hitoshi Isahara and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Hélène Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Takenobu Tokunaga}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {979-10-95546-00-9}, language = {english} }
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