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 article reflects on the relationship between the internationalization of higher education and language policies in Brazil. The study provides a review of language policy literature and internationalization policies materialized in national programs, such as the Science without Borders (SwB) and the Languages without Borders (LwB). The analysis…[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]

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]

While the evolution of spoken languages is well understood and has been studied using traditional historical comparative methods as well as newer computational phylogenetic methods, evolutionary processes resulting in the diversity of contemporary sign languages are poorly understood, and scholars have been largely unsuccessful in grouping sign…[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.

As the Indian population’s interest in biomedicine increased at the end of the nineteenth century, public confidence in India’s indigenous medicines flagged. Physicians of Ayurveda and officials of Indian medical organizations responded with discussions about and plans for reconfiguring the āyurveda (“life science”) of the Sanskrit medical…[Read more]

Gino Bonichi, better known as Scipione after the Roman general Scipio Africanus, was born in Macerata in 1904. He moved to Rome in 1909, where
he studied for a short period at the Academy of Fine Arts. Together with Mario Mafai and Antonietta Raphaël he was one of the founders of the so-called ‘Roman School’ or ‘Via Cavour School’, a group of…[Read more]

Relying on the Nigeria Watch database and newspaper reports from August 2014 to April 2018, this study analyses the root causes, patterns, and politicisation of the farmers/herdsmen conflicts in Nigeria. This study critically examines the relationship between climate change, land disputes, and the patterns of farmers/ herdsmen conflicts in…[Read more]

The twentieth-century debate between modernist and postcolonial scholars around the figure of W.B. Yeats should move beyond purely modern or postcolonial frameworks. Yeats’s poems can be read as meditations through which the Irish poet both anticipates the promise of a postcolonial, modern world, and yet remains attached to the lasting structures…[Read more]

On counterfactual conditional clauses in Turkish

On morphological features in Turkish dialects of Northeast Turkey developed by analogy.

On an Ottoman grammar book from 1730 written by a French Jesuit. The article focuses on the question whether the Ottoman language material given in Latin script reveals information on the state of the ongoing morphophonological changes from early Ottoman to modern Turkish.

Article on Turkish orthography and its acquisiton

The Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (CLICS), has established a computer-assisted framework for the interactive representation of cross-linguistic colexification patterns. In its current form, it has proven to be a useful tool for various kinds of investigation into cross-linguistic semantic associations, ranging from studies on…[Read more]

We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art algorithms for automatic cognate detection by comparing how useful automatically
inferred cognates are for the task of phylogenetic inference compared to classical manually
annotated cognate sets. Our findings suggest
that phylogenies inferred from automated cog-
nate sets come close to…[Read more]

With increasing amounts of digitally available data from all over the world, manual annotation of cognates in multi-lingual word lists becomes more and more time-consuming in historical linguistics. Using available software packages to pre-process the data prior to manual analysis can drastically speed-up the process of cognate detection.…[Read more]

Book chapter of: Dejouer le silence: contre discours sur les femmes haïtiennes