  In this paper we examine the usefulness of two classes of algorithms Distance
Methods, Discrete Character Methods (Felsenstein and Felsenstein 2003) widely
used in genetics, for predicting the family relationships among a set of
related languages and therefore, diachronic language change. Applying these
algorithms to the data on the numbers of shared cognates- with-change and
changed as well as unchanged cognates for a group of six languages belonging to
a Dravidian language sub-family given in Krishnamurti et al. (1983), we
observed that the resultant phylogenetic trees are largely in agreement with
the linguistic family tree constructed using the comparative method of
reconstruction with only a few minor differences. Furthermore, we studied these
minor differences and found that they were cases of genuine ambiguity even for
a well-trained historical linguist. We evaluated the trees obtained through our
experiments using a well-defined criterion and report the results here. We
finally conclude that quantitative methods like the ones we examined are quite
useful in predicting family relationships among languages. In addition, we
conclude that a modest degree of confidence attached to the intuition that
there could indeed exist a parallelism between the processes of linguistic and
genetic change is not totally misplaced.
