The database was created by
Simon J. Greenhill as part of a graduate research project that he was working on with
Russell Gray. Each vocabulary list in the database has 210 basic words. The list was originally from a set of printed 200-item word lists developed by
Robert Blust as a
lexicostatistical aid for classifying the
Austronesian languages. 10 more numerals were added after the original 200th item, 'four', giving the word list its present 210-item inventory. In 2008, a computational analysis of the lexical database showed that the Austronesian languages had originated from Taiwan, rather than from Indonesia or other regions of Oceania. The database was originally hosted by the
University of Auckland, and is currently hosted by the
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. It operates under the
CC BY 4.0 license. ==References==