The fact that “all languages evolve, as long as they exist” (Schleicher 1863: 18f) has been long known to linguists and does not surprise us anymore. The reasons why all language change constantly, however, is still not fully understood. What we know, however, is that language usage must be at the core of language evolution. It is the dynamics amo…[Read more]

A Twitter Moment on August 12, 2017 distilled the author’s views on “Bilingualism and Cultural Identity.” Then the tweetstorm was shared on Facebook with the author’s photos added, following up on the aspect of tourism and the upcoming Tokyo Olympics, focusing especially on cosplay (costume play).

Bilingual introduction to a collection of research papers in Japanese on bilingualism in Japan, between Japanese and English, involving children and adults, investigating the bilingual development of native speakers of Japanese as well as of English.

Skepticism regarding the tree model has a long tradition in historical linguistics. Although scholars have emphasized that the tree model and its long-standing counterpart, the wave theory, are not necessarily incompatible, the opinion that family trees are unrealistic and should be completely abandoned in the field of historical linguistics has…[Read more]

This published Japanese-English guidebook to the island of Shikoku, emphasizing its culture and history, has been available by permission on the Web in French, Spanish, and Dutch at European Websites, as well as this English-Japanese version since 1997. Most of the chapters are bilingual, with English and Japanese alternating for those studying…[Read more]

A cultural, historical, and practical guidebook to Kagawa Prefecture on the island of Shikoku across the narrow Seto Inland Sea from the main island of Japan. Formerly the province of Sanuki, a compact area with convenient train lines, it has great potential for tourism. An active region culturally for more than 2,000 years, it was the birthplace…[Read more]

This is a summary of 12 contributions made by me for the blog “The Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks” in 2017. The contributions are shared in form of a PDF document with a table of contents that allows for a quick search of the contributions and offers also the direct links to the blog.

This is a summary of 12 contributions made by me for the blog “The Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks” in 2016. The contributions are shared in form of a PDF document with a table of contents that allows for a quick search of the contributions and offers also the direct links to the blog.

The presentation suggests how faculty members in the East Asian context can contribute to the local community as well as to their university through online video production. One experiment with the technology of videoblogging, while abroad with students in New Zealand, back to a campus blog in Japan through the Internet, which the presenter termed…[Read more]

Despite a period of almost two decades in which quantitative approaches in historical linguistics have been increasingly used, gaining constantly more popularity even among predominantly qualitatively oriented linguists, we find many problems in the field of computational historical linguistics, which have only sporadically been addressed. In the…[Read more]

Short audio to download, introduces Keisei Awa no Naruto, a Bunraku puppet play, followed by discussion questions for educational use. This 18th Century Chikamatsu play plumbs the depths of pathos with Sophoclean fatalism, leaving the listener wondering, among other things, why such a drama of ‘mono no aware’ is still performed as a puppet play.…[Read more]

By comparing the languages of the world, we gain invaluable insights into human prehistory, predating the appearance of written records by thousands of years. The traditional methods for language comparison are based on manual data inspection. With more and more data available, they reach their practical limits. Computer applications, however,…[Read more]

The author contrasts Japan’s unsurpassed cultural preservation with the destruction of irreplaceable treasures of humanity in Afghanistan and Central Asia, showing the limitations of UNESCO and what factors lead to designation or not of World Heritage Sites. This short podcast concludes by theorizing how discrimination against women originated,…[Read more]

Haiku poems published in Japanese and English periodicals in the 1980s, arranged into the four seasons, now with photos of Kyoto where the author often walks. The bilingual haiku were often composed in Japanese, 5-7-5 syllables, out in nature. Then an English version could either stand alone or complement the Japanese version and provide language…[Read more]

A multilingual podcast, recorded in August 2005 by native speakers of English, Japanese, and Chinese, found proverbs with a similar meaning in each culture. The author arranged this podcast during a Translation class between Japanese and English with fourth year students at Shinonome University in Matsuyama, on Shikoku island in Western Japan.

The Sino-Tibetan language family is one of the world’s largest
and most prominent families, spoken by nearly 1.4 billion people.
Despite the importance of the Sino-Tibetan languages, their pre-history remains controversial, with ongoing debate about when
and where they originated. To shed light on this debate we
develop a database of c…[Read more]

Introduction to “Digital Methods and Traditional Chinese Literary Studies,” a special issue of the Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture.