[It is shown that a linguistic dating system can be set up on the basis of several explicit assumptions about morpheme decay. Thirteen sets of data, presented in partial justification of these assumptions, serve as a basis for calculating a universal constant to express the average rate of retention k ̄ of the basic-root-morphemes : k = 0.8048 ± 0.0176 per millennium, with a confidence limit of 90%. Finally an expression is derived for the sampling-error to be expected in the calculated time-depths of related dialects.]
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Robert Β. Lees (1953) studied this question.
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