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]

This presentation covers some basic elements of data collection methods, fieldwork and interacting with speakers of a critically endangered language.

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.

The article reflects on the relationship between the internationalization of higher education and language policies in Brazil. The study provides a review of language policy literature and internationalization policies materialized in national programs, such as the Science without Borders (SwB) and the Languages without Borders (LwB). The analysis…[Read more]

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]

While the evolution of spoken languages is well understood and has been studied using traditional historical comparative methods as well as newer computational phylogenetic methods, evolutionary processes resulting in the diversity of contemporary sign languages are poorly understood, and scholars have been largely unsuccessful in grouping sign…[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]

On applying the language learning method “Where Are Your Keys?” (WAYK) to the teaching of Western Armenian at a community weekend school.

Gino Bonichi, better known as Scipione after the Roman general Scipio Africanus, was born in Macerata in 1904. He moved to Rome in 1909, where
he studied for a short period at the Academy of Fine Arts. Together with Mario Mafai and Antonietta Raphaël he was one of the founders of the so-called ‘Roman School’ or ‘Via Cavour School’, a group of…[Read more]

On counterfactual conditional clauses in Turkish

On morphological features in Turkish dialects of Northeast Turkey developed by analogy.

On an Ottoman grammar book from 1730 written by a French Jesuit. The article focuses on the question whether the Ottoman language material given in Latin script reveals information on the state of the ongoing morphophonological changes from early Ottoman to modern Turkish.

Article on Turkish orthography and its acquisiton

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]