In this paper, I explore how Greek and Roman poets alluded to the lamentatory background of elegy through the figures of the swan and the nightingale. After surveying the ancient association of elegy and lament (Section I) and the common metapoetic function of birds from Homer onwards (Section II), I analyse Hellenistic and Roman examples where…[Read more]

Financial literacy in the Roman Empire.

This article forms part of a symposium on Paul Cartledge’s ‘Democracy: a life’ (2016). It argues in support of new approaches to Athenian democracy focused on the experience of those who were not active participants in the political institutions of the democracy but excluded because of their status (women, metics, slaves). It further argues that…[Read more]

Reading and performing Aristophanes’ Lysistrata through the work of Judith Butler on performativity and precarity. This paper explores both Aristophanes’ play and the experience of performing and studying it.

The articles are about noble ideas and thoughts evinced in Tamil Literature.

Later on

C. Lanham, ed., Latin Grammar and Rhetoric: Classical Theory and Modern Practice, Continuum Press 2002, pp. 139–179.

This article provides a response to a target article by Jäger (2019), in which an alternative method for the comparison of linguistic reconstruction systems is proposed that is not based on the edit distance.

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.

This document summarizes all contributions to the blog “Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice” from 2018, online also available under https://calc.hypotheses.org.

As per its title

As per its title

The Seleucid Antiochus IV profoundly intervened in the cult of Jerusalem in 168 BC. Under the leadership of the Hasmoneans, an uprising developed against these interventions, which led to the restoration of the cult, the establishment of the Hasmoneans as high priests and the independence of Judea. Against the background of widely differing…[Read more]

The Nike monument of Samothrace is one of the most important works of ancient sculpture. Since its discovery in 1863 it has always had a special appeal for modern viewers, but a deeper understanding of its historical significance is still a problem: if consensus could be reached quickly on the fundamental classification of the Nike statue in the…[Read more]

Review article from History of Political Thought covering books on the history of Athenian democracy and its relevance to politics now (as of publication date in 2017)

THIS IS A PRE-PRINT, PLEASE CITE IT AS: Tresoldi, Tiago; Rzymski, Christoph; Forkel, Robert; Greenhill, Simon J.; List, Johann-Mattis; and Gray, Russell D. (2019) “Managing historical linguistic data for computational phylogenetics and computer-assisted language comparison (PRE-PRINT)”. Jena: Max-Planck-Institute for the Science of Human His…[Read more]

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]

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]

This essay will show, however, that the text is not linked to diplomas, but belonged to an African version of Prosper’s chronicle. I will propose a new edition, which will put the text back in its original context. Rather than looking for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ texts according to 19th-century categories, I will try to analyze the specific character…[Read more]