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.

In this article Stephe Harrop combines theatre history and performance analysis with contemporary agonistic theory to re-conceptualize Greek tragedy’s contested spaces as key to the political potentials of the form. She focuses on Athenian tragedy’s competitive and conflictual negotiation of performance space, understood in relation to the…[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]

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]

This chapter examines the impact of a putative oral Homer upon the work of recent performance-makers. The influence of oral-poetic theories is (as yet) an under-explored area of study, neglected by scholars whose literary expertise leads them to focus on dramatic texts and production histories, with each revisionary text or production regarded as…[Read more]

This essay examines Giambattista Vico’s philology as a contribution to democratic legitimacy. I outline three steps in Vico’s account of the historical and political development of philological knowledge: first, his merger of philosophy and philology, and the effects of that merger on the relative claims of reason and authority; second, his use…[Read more]

Whilst “The Problem with Linear B” (https://hcommons-staging.org/deposits/item/hc:20833/) focused on the physical or visual aspects of Linear objects, this paper mainly examines the secondary assumptions and arguments used to support the thesis that those objects are purely administrative.

A 5-page paper discussing the Linear signage and visual aspects of a Linear B tablet from Thebes, Greece, apparently discovered in the 1990s.

The book demonstrates the invalidity of existing assumptions about the administrative nature of Linear B (“Mycenaean Greek”) and related objects, proposes an alternative revolving around cult art, and explores similar evidence relating to scripts and art from the same and other regions and periods.