Discourse called post-humanism believes that humanism is a phony notion and an excuse for ruling over the other animals — and that it would eventually invite the destruction of the human race. They draw attention to the scientific fact that man is also an ordinary animal and just like other animals and birds is a small part of the huge e…[Read more]

Stories from the Hebrew Bible were popular among the Iberian Peninsula’s Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Beginning in the 14th century, Muslims and Moriscos retold these stories in Aljamiado texts in Spanish or Aragonese written in Arabic characters. These fictionalized retellings drew on vernacular language and literary forms common to C…[Read more]

The formalization of sound changes as finite state transducers is implicit already in the Neogrammarians. For at least six decades scholars have recognized the potential of transducers for improving the speed and rigor of research in historical linguists, but almost no historical linguists actually use them. This article identifies the obstacles…[Read more]

This essay endeavors to explain the really important powers, ways of knowing, and characteristics of life that AI can never have. The author takes off his academic hat here and speaks from direct experience.

A discussion of majāz or allegory that is commonly ascribed to the 15th-century Ottoman polygraph Mollā Lüṭfī and that builds on the works of al-Sakkākī and al-Qazwīnī.
The author gives two alternative overarching classifications: a linguistic vs. cognitive allegory classification, and a metaphor vs. hypallage classification that is supplemen…[Read more]

Before coffee * QRt by PRURITUS MIGRANS * CC: BY-NC-SA

Save a chicken! * PRURITUS MIGRANS * CC: BY-NC-SA

In the course, I give a basic introduction into some of the recent developments in the field of computational historical linguistics. While this field is predominantly represented by phylogenetic approaches with whom scholars try to infer phylogenetic trees from different kinds of language data, the approach taken here is much broader,…[Read more]

The weblog Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice, published on the Hypotheses platform for scientific blogging (https://calc.hypotheses.org/), offers tutorials and discussion notes on computer-assisted approaches to the history and diversity of languages. A substantial part of its content is contributed as part of the ERC Starting…[Read more]

MAD HARRY! * QRt by PRURITUS MIGRANS * CC: BY-ND

Issue of the PJES dedicated to William Shakespeare’s plays in performance

This website provides contextual information and interpretations of the novel Texaco by Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau. It was started in spring 2022 as a collaborative project by students in the Honors Program at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in conjunction with the course Honors 200-008: Caribbean Crucible of Globalization…[Read more]