  Phylogenetic trees can be reconstructed from the matrix which contains the
distances between all pairs of languages in a family. Recently, we proposed a
new method which uses normalized Levenshtein distances among words with same
meaning and averages on all the items of a given list. Decisions about the
number of items in the input lists for language comparison have been debated
since the beginning of glottochronology. The point is that words associated to
some of the meanings have a rapid lexical evolution. Therefore, a large
vocabulary comparison is only apparently more accurate then a smaller one since
many of the words do not carry any useful information. In principle, one should
find the optimal length of the input lists studying the stability of the
different items. In this paper we tackle the problem with an automated
methodology only based on our normalized Levenshtein distance. With this
approach, the program of an automated reconstruction of languages relationships
is completed.

Computation and Language;Physics and Society