Comment on Pigoli et al

Abstract:

I thank Pigoli et al. for their interesting contribution. One question: have they evaluated the fit of their data onto the family tree of these languages? All the languages analysed are Romance languages, but there are degrees of relatedness within this grouping (e.g. Italian is the most divergent, while Portuguese is closer to Spanish than French). Is this analysis able to correctly identify these nested patterns? Rather than averaging across words, are the authors able to align each word separately in discrete manner and use this to recover phylogeny?