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.

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]

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]

Noam Chomsky is undoubtedly one of the brilliant polyglots produced in the last century, who continues to engage critically with various issues that bother us today. In the masterly foreword to this book Akeel Bilgrami, a thinker and linguist, explains that this book is ‘a lifetime of reflection by a scientist of language’ (vii). It is divided int…[Read more]

Learning Sanskrit is usually considered to be a harrowing experience what with the memorization of elaborate rules of grammar and the language’s various verb and noun forms in numerous tenses and cases (such as the vocave case). This has discouraged many students from completing the study of Sanskrit and most leave it halfway. Every textbook t…[Read more]