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]

Powerpoint presentation for the MLA2020 collaborative roundtable “Digital Humanities in Japan and Korea: Approaches and Challenges,” organized by the LLC Korean and LLC Japanese since 1900 Forums. This brief introduction to “Re-Envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in 20th Century Visual and Material Culture” was one of seven presentations by…[Read more]

Efforts on language documentation have been increasing in the past. While the amount of digital data of the world’s languages is increasing, only a small amount of the data is sustainable, since data reuse is often exacerbated by idiosyncratic formats and a negligence of standards that could help to increase the comparability of linguistic data.…[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.

While language contact has so far been predominantly studied on the basis of detailed case studies, the emergence of methods for phylogenetic reconstruction and automated word comparison – as a result of the recent quantitative turn in historical linguistics – has also resulted in new proposals to study language contact situations by means of aut…[Read more]

Invited contributions to the Humanist Discussion Group, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London, a 2019 compilation of the 1997-1998 series, with outdated information omitted: 1) [Introduction to] gleanings from Pacific Asia, 2) Academic Websites subject to Attribution Ethics, 3) Korea-Japan-U.S. Website copying case closed,…[Read more]

The Nagas since time immemorial were never under any foreign powers. They lived in a state of nature where any principality that ever encompassed them was rudimentary, unscathed and the purest that nature could provide them. Their primordial worlds had endured for generations until the modern century without being bothered and unaware of what was…[Read more]

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]