Focusing on the work of John McWhorter and, to a lesser extent, Peter Trudgill, this paper critically examines some common themes in language complexity research from the perspective of intellectual history. The present-day conception that increase in language complexity is somehow a “natural” process which is disturbed under the “ab…[Read more]

While it has been known for a long time that human languages can change in various ways, it was only in the early 19th century that scholars realized that certain aspects of language change proceed in a surprisingly regular manner, allowing us to reconstruct historical stages of languages which have never been documented in written sources. The…[Read more]

Journal of Historical Linguistics, Volume 11, Issue 2, 357 – 366.

This paper argues that the current estimates for the time of influx of Indian genes into
some sections of the Australian Aboriginal population during the Holocene bear large
uncertainties which make elimination of the probability of a more recent gene flow less
likely. It also highlights that indications for the plausibility of a later gene…[Read more]

Kaluza’s law is a proposed restriction in the metre of Beowulf against the resolution of light-heavy sequences: words like cyning ‘king’ can only resolve and count as the equivalent of a single heavy syllable under more restricted circumstances than can words such as wudu ‘wood’. There has been debate about how to define these ‘restrict…[Read more]

„Geiht“ mit h und „Blatt, goot, oolt“ mit t? Im Gegensatz zum Hochdeutschen ist das Niederdeutsche bis heute keine normierte Schriftsprache. Wie kann es aber sein, dass offensichtlich falsche Schreibweisen (z. B. das falsche Dehnungs-h im Wort „geiht“) seit Jahren als maßgebend und verbindlich für einen großen Teil des niederdeutsche…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: Análisis de la estructura narrativa de ´Shutter Island´ (Martin Scorsese, 2010), una película en la que el espectador se introduce en el mundo ficticio de una isla prisión / institución total, sólo para descubrir más adelante que no se trata del mundo social efectivo del protagonista, sino del mundo de su visión alucinat…[Read more]

The weblog Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice, published on the Hypotheses platform for scientific blogging, 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 Grant “Computer-Assisted Language C…[Read more]

Spanish Abstract: ‘Riofrío’ es una novela de no ficción de Santiago Muñoz Machado, eminente abogado y profesor de derecho, sobre un importante caso judicial del famoso juez Baltasar Garzón—un largo proceso de instrucción en el que Garzón intentó empapelar a una serie de inversores que iban desde Berlusconi hasta Miguel Durán. Fue un macroproc…[Read more]

PhD dissertation in Saami linguistics, University of Oulu, Finland, 2009.

Kaluza’s law is a proposed restriction in the metre of Beowulf against the resolution of light-heavy sequences: words like cyning ‘king’ can only resolve and count as the equivalent of a single heavy syllable under more restricted circumstances than can words such as wudu ‘wood’. There has been debate about how to define these ‘restricted…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: Argumentamos contra la normativa española sobre el uso obligatorio y ubicuo de mascarillas en todos los espacios públicos, incluyendo el aire libre. Denunciamos estas normas y leyes como despóticas, arbitrarias y carentes de base científica, y mostramos cómo su razón de ser se halla tanto en la agenda globalista de los princ…[Read more]

Kingship has been a political mainstay in human history, even when peoples have lacked monarchic rulers. This essay examines the book of Samuel as a source for the cultural history of ancient Judah, focusing on the question of how Samuel’s representations of monarchy would function for its readers in the early Second Temple era. In this era, w…[Read more]

This chapter focuses on Ezekiel as a text, i.e., a collection of writings meant to be read again and again. As a text, it presents a range of ideas in dialogue with one another—and sometimes in tension—thus providing ample space for continual discussion and reinterpretation of its ideas among its original communities of readers in antiquity. Eze…[Read more]

Contribution to a volume reflecting on Tim Ingold’s recent interventions on the relationship between anthropology and ethnography “Anthropology and Ethnography Are Not Equivalent: Reorienting Anthropology for the Future”, edited by Irfan Ahmad.

Der computergestützte Sprachvergleich (Wu et al. 2020) hat zum Ziel, Sprachvielfalt und Sprachgeschichte mit Hilfe einer Mischung aus computerbasierten und nicht-automatischen aber formalen Methoden zu untersuchen und dadurch grundlegende Fragen zur Entwicklung spezifischer Sprachfamilien (Sagart et al. 2019) oder zur Typologie von Sprachvielfalt…[Read more]

“The narratives of the world are numberless”; yet, all stories may be seen as chapters of a single story, the story of universal evolution as uncovered by contemporary science, with processes of human emergence and cultural development as a prominent backdrop to the understanding of any narrative process. Evolutionary approaches to literary and…[Read more]

Behave by Robert Sapolsky (Vintage, London, 2017) is a book full of information about human aggression. Even though Prof. Sapolsky does not provide new solutions to deal with human aggression, he tells us about its biological roots and makes us look at the aggressors with a broader understanding. Our behaviours are more complex than what a single…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: ‘Lone Star’ (John Sayles, 1996) es una película sobre la etnicidad y sobre el peso del pasado tratado aquí de manera reflexiva. Es un tema inevitablemente presente en las películas norteamericanas (o en muchas de ellas) pero a menudo sólo como parte del trasfondo, o evitado en el desarrollo de la historia principal. Aquí está…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: Dos hombres en lados opuestos de la ley están infiltrados —en la Policía y en la mafia— pero hierven la violencia y la sangre derramada cuando la información sale a la luz, y se envía a cada topo a averiguar quién es el enemigo interior. ‘Infiltrados’ es una película de Martin Scorsese que explora la ‘paradoja del espía’, a…[Read more]