Repeatedly in recent years, phylogenetic analyses of linguistic data have reached the world's leading scientific journals, but in ways hugely controversial within linguistics itself. Phylogenetic analysis methods, taken from the biological sciences, have been applied to date and track how major language families dispersed through prehistory, with implications also for archaeology and genetics. As this approach is extended to ever more language families worldwide, this review offers methodological perspectives and cautionary tales from the most high-profile and hotly disputed case of all: Indo-European. This article surveys the checkered history of these phylogenetic methods and of the cognacy databases they have relied on for their linguistic input data. It clears up cross-disciplinary misconceptions about this new methodology, identifies major flaws in the current state of the art (hence its highly inconsistent results), diagnoses the causes, and outlines new solutions that might bring the field closer to living up to its potential.

中文翻译：

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印欧语系的认知数据库和系统发育研究

近年来，语言数据的系统发育分析一再出现在世界领先的科学期刊上，但在语言学本身内部却存在巨大争议。来自生物科学的系统发育分析方法已被应用于日期和跟踪主要语言家族如何在史前时期分散，对考古学和遗传学也有影响。随着这种方法扩展到全球越来越多的语言家族，这篇评论从最引人注目和最有争议的案例中提供了方法论观点和警示故事：印欧语系。本文调查了这些系统发育方法的曲折历史以及他们依赖于语言输入数据的同源数据库。它消除了对这种新方法的跨学科误解，