This paper is a critical appraisal of Karl Marx’s theory of historical materialism and a deployment of its emphasis on economic factor in addressing Nigeria’s socio-economic situation. As we applaud Marx’s materialistic approach to history as an account that is rich enough to promote contextual understanding of past events in various part of the w…[Read more]

“Ideology” has fallen out of favor as a term of art. Terms like “equity,” “bias,” “gap,” “discourse,” “norm,” various “isms,” “consciousness,” “experience,” and “policy” tend to appear in scholarly and mainstream education dialogue when it comes to social-political practices. Yet the term is important both historically and for the present day. A…[Read more]

While analysing lexical data of Western Kho-Bwa languages of the Sino-Tibetan or Trans-
Himalayan family with the help of a computer-assisted approach for historical language
comparison, we observed gaps in the data where one or more varieties lacked forms for certain
concepts. We employed a new workflow, combining manual and automated steps,…[Read more]

This is a brief summary of my research results in the field of historical-comparative linguistics and on the subject of language reconstruction. The main focus is on the scientific examination of proto-languages. In this paper, I want to pursue the question about the possibility of a genetic relationship between Proto-Indo-European and…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: Algunas reflexiones sobre (auto)engaño e ideología por vía de un comentario sobre el libro Ideología de Teun A. van Dijk. Los poderosos engañan. Creen tener un acceso privilegiado a la realidad, y utilizan esa perspectiva dominante (‘topsight’) para dominar. Con frecuencia para dominar engañando. Pero también se engañ…[Read more]

This document summarizes all contributions to the blog “Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice” from 2019, online also available under https://calc.hypotheses.org.

The factors behind the rise of Islamism in Turkey remain the subject of intense scholarly debate. There are remarkable relationships between the rise of Islamism and preceding changes in population dynamics in Turkey. Rapid urbanization and large-scale migration of Kurds and other ethnic minorities from the east of the county to major cities in…[Read more]

Friedrich Nietzsche was among the figures from the history of nineteenth-century philosophy that, perhaps surprisingly, some of the Vienna Circle’s members had presented as one of their predecessors. While, primarily for political reasons, most Anglophone figures in the history of analytic philosophy had taken a dim view of Nietzsche, the Vienna C…[Read more]

Is ethics innate to human nature? In Ethical Life Webb Keane tries to answer this question on the basis of empirical research. He attempts this through an analysis of natural and social histories—that is, the analyses of naturalistic research like “neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, developmental psychology, and biological ant…[Read more]

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”

La pandemia ha dejado al descubierto, necesidades y problemas sociales, asimismo, obligó a los gobiernos dar respuestas inmediatas de corto y mediano plazo para evitar el caos o la anomia social. El Covid-19, generó las condiciones hacia la realización de cambios y transformaciones sociales, para que, de esta incertidumbre y recesión, en lug…[Read more]

chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Translation & Activism

“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]

e popular idea, especially among the young, is that religion and spirituality are things of the old age. We generally think that spirituality is a post-retirement plan; something which has to be enjoyed with the gratuity, provident fund, and pension that you get after retirement. This is not true. Spirituality is something we need when we are…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: Notas, debates y comentarios con ocasión del congreso The “Holocaust Metaphor” (La ́Metáfora del Holocausto ́), en la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Zaragoza (a finales de mayo de 2013). _________________________________________________________________________

English abstract: Notes, debates and comm…[Read more]

This is the syllabus for an introductory course on Marx and critical theory that I taught at Binghamton University in the spring semester, 2020. It revises and expands an earlier iteration of the course that I had taught in spring, 2018, also at Binghamton University.

Some literary scholars have claimed that predictive models can measure the strength of the boundaries that separate different cultural categories—genres, for instance, or market segments. But interpreting textual models as evidence about the strength of a cultural distinction has seemed a questionable move to many readers. We use book reviews to t…[Read more]