Linguistic geniuses such as Heinrich Schliemann have long fascinated many with their exceptional capabilities to master multiple languages on top of their own mother tongues. These individuals are believed to be able to extract the probabilistic, abstract patterns underlying a target form’s linguistic and frequency distribution in second l…[Read more]

Line 1122 of Beowulf represents a problem where the findings of metrics, historical phonology, and the reading of the manuscript are in conflict with one another. I revive and adapt Tolkien’s proposal to emend lāðbite līċes līġ ealle forswealg to lāðbite līġes līċ eall forswealg “the cruel bite of fire swallowed up the entire bodies”. This…[Read more]

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]

This is a brief summary of my research results in the field of historical-comparative linguistics and on the subject of language reconstruction. The main focus is on the scientific examination of proto-languages. In this paper, I want to pursue the question about the possibility of a genetic relationship between Proto-Indo-European and…[Read more]

This document summarizes all contributions to the blog “Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice” from 2019, online also available under https://calc.hypotheses.org.

Workshop presentation about reconstruction of sounds preserved only in marginal daughter languages attested later than the earliest daughters

Discussion of recent new proposals for the reconstruction of the PIE sounds called “laryngeals”

“སོ་རི་མེ་བུ།”, “so ri me bu” (teeth, mountain, fire, boy), is an alphabet book for Tibetan. It was in use at Esukhia’s immersion and online school from 2015 to 2018, when it was replaced by an improved and expanded version called “A0 Jongdeb” (https://www.esukhia.xyz/a0-cover). At the time, it represented a major pedagogical breakthroug…[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]

Native speakers are often assumed to be efficient in identifying whether a word in their language has been borrowed, even when they do not have direct knowledge of the donor language from which it was taken. To detect borrowings, speakers make use of various strategies, often in combination, relying on clues such as semantics of the words in…[Read more]

Review of a collection of papers on variation in historical writing systems. The review focuses particularly on chapters on Linear B, Anatolian alphabets, and Hittite cuneiform.

In this paper, a new method for multiple sequence alignment in historical linguistics is presented. The algorithm is based on the traditional framework of progressive multiple sequence alignment (cf. Durbin et al. 2002:143-149) whose shortcomings are further enhanced by (1) a sound class representation of phonetic sequences (cf. Dolgopolsky 1986,…[Read more]

Through an experiment on a Western Kho-Bwa linguistic dataset, Timotheus A. Bodt and Johann-Mattis List provide evidence for the regularity of sound change.

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein shows us how to use the Hebrew language as a model for understanding the differences between similar words

While the amount of digitally available data on the worlds’ languages is steadily increasing, with more and more languages being documented, only a small proportion of the language resources produced are sustainable. Data reuse is often difficult due to idiosyncratic formats and a negligence of standards that could help to increase the…[Read more]

While the amount of cross-linguistic data is constantly increasing, most datasets produced today and in the past cannot be considered FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reproducible). To remedy this and to increase the comparability of cross-linguistic resources, it is not enough to set up standards and best practices for data to be…[Read more]

By reviewing a recent quantitative study of rhyme patterns in Mandarin Chinese, this study shows how data handling and data analysis in the study of rhyme patterns can be improved. Suggestions for improvement include (a) a consistent annotation of rhyme data, which is exhaustive and facilitates data reuse, and (b) emphasizes the importance of…[Read more]

Spanish Abstract: Presentamos una perspectiva pragmalingüística sobre la actuación discursiva inspirada en la sociología dramatística de Erving Goffman. En su actuación discursiva el hablante intenta justificar su postura con respecto a la afiliación con grupos e identidades sociales determinadas. Al posicionarse, perfila su identidad y modela…[Read more]

An imperfective TAM prefix of the form /r-/ (typically labeled a “Habitual”) is apparent in all branches of the Zapotec language family and can be reconstructed to Proto-Zapotec. Central Zapotec, however, has innovated a progressive prefix /ka(j)-/ (see Broadwell 2015; Smith-Stark 2004). This raises the question: how has the introduction of thi…[Read more]

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]