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”

Review of Charleston Belles Abroad in Journal of American History

“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]

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]

Native speakers are often assumed to be efficient in identifying whether a word in their language has been borrowed, even when they do not have direct knowledge of the donor language from which it was taken. To detect borrowings, speakers make use of various strategies, often in combination, relying on clues such as semantics of the words in…[Read more]

Time Layered Cultural Map (TLCMap) is an ambitious, ARC funded, digital humanities mapping infrastructure initiative in Australia. TLCMap infrastructure is for everyone, but the inspiration, conception and development of it has always had Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mapping at its heart. If Australian culture is world famous for anything…[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.

Entry to a Deep in Japan Podcast, during which Steve McCarty elucidates the origins of Japan, the Imperial line, and how people viewed their environment from 30,000 years ago to the golden age of the Heian Period. He tells moving legends to rival Sophocles, culminating in a fusion of many religions in a mountain range viewed as a maṇḍala that cou…[Read more]

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.

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

Below we develop a method to determine whether the use of grammatical particles in Chinese Buddhist scriptures is characteristic for the period of their translation. The corpus consists of three different Chinese translations of an early Indian Mahāyāna text from two different periods. We use the results of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to d…[Read more]

Hidden in the Buddhist biographical literature on eminent monks is a large amount of information about who knew whom. It is especially rich for the time between 300 and 1000 CE, when the four major collections of “Biographies of Eminent Monks” (gaoseng zhuan) allow us to date and locate the relationships of individuals to a degree unimaginable for…[Read more]

El autor presenta una visión panorámica de la evolución histórica y conceptual de algunos temas clave de los estudios urbanos: el tamaño de la ciudad, el espacio urbano, el concepto de urbanita y ciudadano, y el modelo de ciudad ideal. Las propuestas de los sociólogos del siglo XIX y de la Escuela de Chicago, han dejado paso a un urbanismo postm…[Read more]

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 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]