An ancient Sumerian proverb may be read as “good fortune [is embedded in] organisation and wisdom.” The present centennial survey is solely about organizing the last one hundred years of scholarship for a Sumerian afterlife myth named “Inanna’s Descent to the Netherworld.” The initial discovery of artifacts with snippets of the myth can be dated…[Read more]

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

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]

Skepticism regarding the tree model has a long tradition in historical linguistics. Although scholars have emphasized that the tree model and its long-standing counterpart, the wave theory, are not necessarily incompatible, the opinion that family trees are unrealistic and should be completely abandoned in the field of historical linguistics has…[Read more]

This is a summary of 12 contributions made by me for the blog “The Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks” in 2017. 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 is a summary of 12 contributions made by me for the blog “The Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks” in 2016. 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.

Despite a period of almost two decades in which quantitative approaches in historical linguistics have been increasingly used, gaining constantly more popularity even among predominantly qualitatively oriented linguists, we find many problems in the field of computational historical linguistics, which have only sporadically been addressed. In the…[Read more]

By comparing the languages of the world, we gain invaluable insights into human prehistory, predating the appearance of written records by thousands of years. The traditional methods for language comparison are based on manual data inspection. With more and more data available, they reach their practical limits. Computer applications, however,…[Read more]

We present a fully automated workflow for phylogenetic reconstruction on large datasets, consisting of two novel methods, one for fast detection of cognates and one for fast Bayesian phylogenetic inference. Our results show that the methods take less than a few minutes to process language families that have so far required large amounts of time…[Read more]

This paper is intended to be an approach to the festivities that take place mainly in Thrace and Macedonia, but also in other Greek geographical locations, during the dodecaimero and the three weeks of Carnival prior to Lent and during other important Christian days. Since ancient times, these festivals have maintained their origins in initiation…[Read more]

Article comparing representations of domestic, civic, and imperial violence in novels and in apocryphal acts.

Horace is sometimes said to profess in the Odes a “poetics of presence”, a philosophical or aesthetic orientation that privileges the here and now. This paper examines how such an orientation toward the present might interact with the poet’s use of the future tense and especially with those future verbs that seem to postpone focal events. It is co…[Read more]

In Books 1-3 of the Odes, Horace makes clear a hierarchy of divinity through the structures of lyric address and distinguishes the gods and goddesses of his poetic preference from the preeminent deities of Augustan state cult. Specifically, he equivocates masterfully as he approaches Apollo and Jupiter while elevating Mercury, a minor figure in…[Read more]

Blog post, published with the blog “History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences”. Here shared in form of a paper draft. Please cite as:

List, Johann-Mattis. 2018. Towards a history of concept list compilation in historical linguistics. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2018/10/31/concept-list-compilation/

The Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (CLICS), has established a computer-assisted framework for the interactive representation of cross-linguistic colexification patterns. In its current form, it has proven to be a useful tool for various kinds of investigation into cross-linguistic semantic associations, ranging from studies on…[Read more]

Current efforts in computational historical linguistics are predominantly concerned
with phylogenetic inference. Methods for ancestral state reconstruction have only
been applied sporadically. In contrast to phylogenetic algorithms, automatic reconstruction methods presuppose phylogenetic information in order to explain what has
evolved when…[Read more]

With increasing amounts of digitally available data from all over the world, manual annotation of cognates in multi-lingual word lists becomes more and more time-consuming in historical linguistics. Using available software packages to pre-process the data prior to manual analysis can drastically speed-up the process of cognate detection.…[Read more]