1492 was a momentous year for Spain. The Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas, leading to the continent’s largescale colonization by Europeans. Columbus did so by order of the so-called Catholic Monarchs of Spain, Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, while actually trying to discover a new travel r…[Read more]

Este término tiene que ver con la caracterización socio-religiosa, se trata de cristianos, y no con una caracterización lingüística. No hubo ni lengua ni dialectos mozárabes, es decir, limitados a los cristianos. Hubo un romance andalusí, polimórfico, que era utilizado por los diversos habitantes de al-Ándalus, cristianos, musulmanes y judíos,…[Read more]

La expansión del islam no significó la desaparición del cristianismo en esos territorios,
donde, en condiciones más o menos precarias, según las épocas y los lugares, se ha mantenido
hasta hoy; pero incluso en los escritos cristianos, el latín fue sustituido por el árabe,
hasta el punto de que esta última lengua se utilizó para el aprendiza…[Read more]

In the new “Ad fontes” feature of Adendros, I want to offer English translations of short source texts or text excerpts from the history of (Greek) language studies which struck me as particularly interesting, enlightening, or enticing.

Today: part two of a grammar dispute between Philipp Nicodemus Frischlin and Martin Crusius, two six…[Read more]

Vandaag is het exact 500 jaar geleden dat Hadrianus Amerotius’ (ca. 1495-1560) Compendium Graecae grammatices te Leuven verscheen in het atelier van Dirk Martens.

Linguistic geniuses such as Heinrich Schliemann have long fascinated many with their exceptional capabilities to master multiple languages on top of their own mother tongues. These individuals are believed to be able to extract the probabilistic, abstract patterns underlying a target form’s linguistic and frequency distribution in second l…[Read more]

Line 1122 of Beowulf represents a problem where the findings of metrics, historical phonology, and the reading of the manuscript are in conflict with one another. I revive and adapt Tolkien’s proposal to emend lāðbite līċes līġ ealle forswealg to lāðbite līġes līċ eall forswealg “the cruel bite of fire swallowed up the entire bodies”. This…[Read more]

While analysing lexical data of Western Kho-Bwa languages of the Sino-Tibetan or Trans-
Himalayan family with the help of a computer-assisted approach for historical language
comparison, we observed gaps in the data where one or more varieties lacked forms for certain
concepts. We employed a new workflow, combining manual and automated steps,…[Read more]

While analysing lexical data of Western Kho-Bwa languages of the Sino-Tibetan or Trans-
Himalayan family with the help of a computer-assisted approach for historical language
comparison, we observed gaps in the data where one or more varieties lacked forms for certain
concepts. We employed a new workflow, combining manual and automated steps,…[Read more]

This is a brief summary of my research results in the field of historical-comparative linguistics and on the subject of language reconstruction. The main focus is on the scientific examination of proto-languages. In this paper, I want to pursue the question about the possibility of a genetic relationship between Proto-Indo-European and…[Read more]

This document summarizes all contributions to the blog “Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice” from 2019, online also available under https://calc.hypotheses.org.

Workshop presentation about reconstruction of sounds preserved only in marginal daughter languages attested later than the earliest daughters

Discussion of recent new proposals for the reconstruction of the PIE sounds called “laryngeals”

When comparing the more than 7000 human language varieties spoken today, one encounters a huge diversity in all domains of language, ranging from phonology via morphology up to syntax and pragmatics. In the seminar, we explored how language diversity can be studied empirically. In order to do so, we looked at linguistic approaches to the study of…[Read more]

“སོ་རི་མེ་བུ།”, “so ri me bu” (teeth, mountain, fire, boy), is an alphabet book for Tibetan. It was in use at Esukhia’s immersion and online school from 2015 to 2018, when it was replaced by an improved and expanded version called “A0 Jongdeb” (https://www.esukhia.xyz/a0-cover). At the time, it represented a major pedagogical breakthroug…[Read more]

The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorize the relationship between literature and society in the late-colonial era. He used the genre’s brevity to compress his portrayals of well-known female types—such as widows, prostitutes, and goodwives—into singular emotional events. This enabled Pudumaippittan to evoke…[Read more]

This study presents a digital, retro-standardized edition of the Tableaux Phonétiques des Patois Suisses Romands (TPPSR), an early collection of lexical dialect data of the Suisse romande, which was compiled by Louis Gauchat, Jules Jeanqaquet, and Ernest Tappolet in the beginning of the 20th century and later published in 1925. While the plan of…[Read more]

This study presents a digital, retro-standardized edition of the Tableaux Phonétiques des Patois Suisses Romands (TPPSR), an early collection of lexical dialect data of the Suisse romande, which was compiled by Louis Gauchat, Jules Jeanqaquet, and Ernest Tappolet in the beginning of the 20th century and later published in 1925. While the plan of…[Read more]