Identification of Phonetic Shifts in Germanic Languages Using the Swadesh List

The dataset illustrates the method of identifying phonetic shifts in related languages through the analysis of phonetic forms of words from the 207-word Swadesh lists (taken from wiktionary.org). The words from the lists in four languages (English, Swedish, Dutch and Proto-Germanic) were transcribed and compared with their related counterparts in the other language in terms of correspondence of their individual phonemes. The method also utilizes the Levenshtein distance metric to identify the words that underwent the least amount of phonetic change. Having compared the corresponding words from the lists in all four languages, we managed to identify a number of consistent phonetic shifts, some of which are well-described in the works on language history, while others seem to be rather overlooked. These results prove the method is fit for implementation in future research of rare phonetic processes in related languages. The results obtained from a smaller collection of words already prove certain diachronic phonetic hypotheses. However, the said method can also be applied to bigger corpora to mass-extract less common phonetic shifts that were not described earlier.