Results of Sui and Kam dialect comparison

7.5 Results of Sui and Kam dialect comparison

Having established that LD can be effectively applied to phonemicised transcriptions, we conducted LD analysis on a set of 275 cognates found in both Sui and Kam. Data selection and pre-processing were described in section 7.3. Normalised Levenshtein distances as calculated by Gabmap are shown in table 7.11. Exact distances between the four Sui dialects included here are slightly different from those shown in table 7.4 because they are based on a slightly different set of words. Nevertheless, the differences in absolute distances are not great, and the distances relative to each other are the same. Although Yang’an TN appears to group with the other Sui dialects, it is marginally phonetically closer to Southern Kam Yandong than to most of the Sui varieties. The results of WPGMA cluster analysis are shown in figure 7.11 and a multidimensional scaling MDS plot is shown in figure 7.12. Again, we used several clustering algorithms, including fuzzy clustering, and the results were virtually identical every time. Table 7.11. Levenshtein distances between Sui and Kam dialects, based on 275 cognate words. Distances of less than 0.15 are shaded in grey Sui Kam Central Southern Pandong Yang’an Southern Southern Northern SD JQ PD TN Yandong Chejiang Shuidong 0.048 0.101 0.114 0.101 0.112 0.097 0.151 0.157 0.152 0.100 0.172 0.181 0.168 0.122 0.084 0.226 0.228 0.220 0.186 0.162 0.114 Figure 7.11. Sui-Kam cluster dendrogram WPGMA. Figure 7.12. MDS plot of Sui and Kam LDs. Our main question here is the positioning of Yang’an dialect, represented here by TN, in Kam-Sui. The clustering algorithms all indicate that TN belongs to the Sui cluster as in figure 7.11. However, TN’s grouping with the other Sui varieties is far less certain in the MDS plot figure 7.12. Out of the four Sui dialects, it is clearly the closest to the Kam dialects. The position of Yang’an in relation to Kam is far clearer for phonetic distance than for lexical difference see chapter 6, section 6.3.1. Working from the hypothesis that Yang’an historically belongs to the Kam branch, this indicates that pronunciation may be more resistant to change than lexicon, and that LD, especially using phonemicised transcriptions, may be more useful to the historical linguist than lexical similarity counts.

7.6 Conclusions