The usefulness of computational linguistic tools, such as named entity recognition (NER) systems, in linguistic or literary studies of under-resourced languages is an area that is still relatively unexplored. In this study the CTexTools2 NER system, which perform NER on all official South African languages, are applied to one Afrikaans novel and…[Read more]

This research addresses the issues surrounding the low level of Digital Humanities (DH) technological consciousness among students and academics in the humanities discipline in Africa (Nigeria). The study, using online questionnaires, shows that despite the wide acceptance of DH Technological tools among some African scholars in the humanities,…[Read more]

Drawing insight from Toyin Falola’s call for African scholars to Africanize knowledge, this paper is an attempt to Africanize digital technological tools being used for research in African studies. Our aim is to address the challenges confronting scholars in African Studies, especially across the disciplines in the Arts and Humanities, in their d…[Read more]

In this paper, a digital assessment tool that is used to monitor food security in rural homesteads is presented. It provides instant results in the form of statistics that can help in planning for appropriate interventions. Food security is an essential and universal ingredient of any community’s well-being. The fact that food security is a c…[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]

The objective of this study is to discuss the adoption of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in the Brazilian and Flemish contexts, considering the influence of globalization and internationalization on the languages in higher education. To reach this goal, a bibliographic research was carried out, in order to analyze documents related to…[Read more]

Tradition says that the Tibetan Emperor (སྲོང་བཙན་སྒམ་པོ) sent one of his ministers (ཐོན་མི་སམྦྷོ་ཊ) to India in the 7th century CE. It’s reported that, when he came back, he created a script for Tibetan, and wrote several grammars. In each of the three following centuries, special councils updated the written language. And, these updates r…[Read more]

Answer to recent critique by Pyysalo of the laryngeal theory in IE linguistics and evaluation of Pyysalo’s own reconstruction proposal (GFT, System PIE).