Jambu: A historical linguistic database for South Asian languages
Aryaman Arora Adam Farris Samopriya Basu Suresh Kolichala
We introduce Jambu, a cognate database of South Asian languages which unifies
dozens of previous sources in a structured and accessible format. The database
includes 287k lemmata from 602 lects, grouped together in 23k sets of cognates.
We outline the data wrangling necessary to compile the dataset and train neural
models for reflex prediction on the Indo-Aryan subset of the data. We hope that
Jambu is an invaluable resource for all historical linguists and Indologists,
and look towards further improvement and expansion of the database.