In the new “Ad fontes” feature of Adendros, I want to offer English translations of short source texts or text excerpts from the history of (Greek) language studies which struck me as particularly interesting, enlightening, or enticing.

Today: part two of a grammar dispute between Philipp Nicodemus Frischlin and Martin Crusius, two six…[Read more]

Vandaag is het exact 500 jaar geleden dat Hadrianus Amerotius’ (ca. 1495-1560) Compendium Graecae grammatices te Leuven verscheen in het atelier van Dirk Martens.

While analysing lexical data of Western Kho-Bwa languages of the Sino-Tibetan or Trans-
Himalayan family with the help of a computer-assisted approach for historical language
comparison, we observed gaps in the data where one or more varieties lacked forms for certain
concepts. We employed a new workflow, combining manual and automated steps,…[Read more]

When comparing the more than 7000 human language varieties spoken today, one encounters a huge diversity in all domains of language, ranging from phonology via morphology up to syntax and pragmatics. In the seminar, we explored how language diversity can be studied empirically. In order to do so, we looked at linguistic approaches to the study of…[Read more]

This study presents a digital, retro-standardized edition of the Tableaux Phonétiques des Patois Suisses Romands (TPPSR), an early collection of lexical dialect data of the Suisse romande, which was compiled by Louis Gauchat, Jules Jeanqaquet, and Ernest Tappolet in the beginning of the 20th century and later published in 1925. While the plan of…[Read more]

This is the Vol – 2, SPECIAL ISSUE 3 : VOL – 1, FEBRUARY 2020.

In 2016-2017, a 10-person team worked for 3 months with the goal of creating a multi-use, balanced corpus, similar to the Brown Corpus (BROWN Corpus search online). The speech section of the completed Nanhai Corpus—named for its sponsors, the Nanhai Nunnery of Taiwan—is a 289,497 word corpus of collected, transcribed, and word-split natural spe…[Read more]

Research into grammaticalization has an established genealogy, which records the birth of the term “grammaticalization” in more or less its present-day sense with Antoine Meillet (1866–1936), but recognizes an intellectual lineage extending back to at least the Enlightenment. Among the immediate predecessors of Meillet, Georg von der Gabel…[Read more]

This is a summary of 12 contributions made by me for the blog “The Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks” in 2018. 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.

Catalogue of the Exhibition held in Pisa in October 2015.

This brief blog post discusses qualitative methods for identifying horizontal processes in the evolution of sign language handshapes in manual alphabets using phylogenetic network methods.

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]

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 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 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]

We present a fully automated workflow for phylogenetic reconstruction on large datasets, consisting of two novel methods, one for fast detection of cognates and one for fast Bayesian phylogenetic inference. Our results show that the methods take less than a few minutes to process language families that have so far required large amounts of time…[Read more]

On applying the language learning method “Where Are Your Keys?” (WAYK) to the teaching of Western Armenian at a community weekend school.

Blog post, published with the blog “History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences”. Here shared in form of a paper draft. Please cite as:

List, Johann-Mattis. 2018. Towards a history of concept list compilation in historical linguistics. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2018/10/31/concept-list-compilation/