I just wrote my monthly German blog post for February, this time devoted to the question of language universals, the language faculty, and our work on sign language evolution. You can find the post here.

We knew that an article would feature our research on sign language evolution in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. But when we saw today that it appeared even on the first page, we were really surprised. Unfortunately, the article is not yet online available, so we cannot link it here, but it seemed interesting enough to mention this.

Further good news are that the CNRS 2020 Summer School on "Semantic shifts from lexicon to grammar – diachronic and typological perspectives" was accepted and will be held on the island of Porquerolles in the south of France from 14th to 25th September 2020. I myself will teach a two day workshop on computational methods. More information can be found on the official website.

Johann-Mattis List and I were involved in a successful workshop on Reproducible Research and Data Management that took place last week at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena.

Open to entire academic community, we collaborated with collegues from our department and from the Department of Archeogenetics to introduce participants to command-line usage and Bash, Git and GitHub, and reproducible research in general. The linguistic sessions focused on the reference catalogs used for most of our research (Glottolog, Concepticon, and CLTS), on Lexibank, and on orthographic profiles, ending with a hands-on session on Lexibank. Christoph Rzymski provided unvaluable help, teaching Git and explaining the rationale for CSV(W) and CLDF, and we were joined by Simon J. Greenhill when presenting Lexibank to the general public.

Our slides will be put online in the next days, linked from the Workshop's page. The first presentation is here.

Already on Monday last week, a new blog post appeared in which I discussed the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in the light of the article on emotion concepts which appeared in December last year.

The blog post, titled "From words to deeds" can be found here.

Today I published a blog post that contains step-by-step instructions for adding concept lists to Concepticon. The goal of this post is to give helpful tips for the contribution process in our project. The post can be found here.

Today, a new paper by Justin Power, Guido Grimm, and myself appeared, discussing the dispersal of sign language manual alphabets:

The evolution of spoken languages has been studied since the mid-nineteenth century using traditional historical comparative methods and, more recently, computational phylogenetic methods. By contrast, evolutionary processes resulting in the diversity of contemporary sign languages (SLs) have received much less attention, and scholars have been largely unsuccessful in grouping SLs into monophyletic language families using traditional methods. To date, no published studies have attempted to use language data to infer relationships among SLs on a large scale. Here, we report the results of a phylogenetic analysis of 40 contemporary and 36 historical SL manual alphabets coded for morphological similarity. Our results support grouping SLs in the sample into six main European lineages, with three larger groups of Austrian, British and French origin, as well as three smaller groups centring around Russian, Spanish and Swedish. The British and Swedish lineages support current knowledge of relationships among SLs based on extra-linguistic historical sources. With respect to other lineages, our results diverge from current hypotheses by indicating (i) independent evolution of Austrian, French and Spanish from Spanish sources; (ii) an internal Danish subgroup within the Austrian lineage; and (iii) evolution of Russian from Austrian sources.

The paper, titled "Evolutionary dynamics in the dispersal of sign languages" here.

In addition, I published a new tutorial blogpost in which I show how large datasets can be easily linked to our Concepticon data, which you can find here.

Today, a new paper by our group and colleagues from the DLCE appeared in the journal Scientific Data, in which we present the third installment of our CLICS database.

Advances in computer-assisted linguistic research have been greatly influential in reshaping linguistic research. With the increasing availability of interconnected datasets created and curated by researchers, more and more interwoven questions can now be investigated. Such advances, however, are bringing high requirements in terms of rigorousness for preparing and curating datasets. Here we present CLICS, a Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (CLICS). CLICS tackles interconnected interdisciplinary research questions about the colexification of words across semantic categories in the world’s languages, and show-cases best practices for preparing data for cross-linguistic research. This is done by addressing shortcomings of an earlier version of the database, CLICS2, and by supplying an updated version with CLICS3, which massively increases the size and scope of the project. We provide tools and guidelines for this purpose and discuss insights resulting from organizing student tasks for database updates.

The paper, titled "The Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications, reproducible analysis of cross-linguistic polysemies" which involves a lot of co-authors and particularly many people from our CALC team, can be found here.

In addition, I published a new German blogpost in which I discuss the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in the light of cross-linguistic data, which you can find here.

The Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications is one of the most prominent outputs of the CALC project and the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, since it combines our interest in standardization, aggregation of cross-linguistic lexical data, graph-based approaches for exploratory data analysis, and interactive visualization tools.

Thanks to a very fruitful collaboration with psychologists from the University of North Carolina, it could now also be shown that the data in CLICS has the potential to provide essential evidence for questions related to human cognition. The study shows that emotion semantics vary across language families, but that there is a certain common core of similarities that can be used as an explanandum of certain structures across all cultures:

Many human languages have words for emotions such as “anger” and “fear,” yet it is not clear whether these emotions have similar meanings across languages, or why their meanings might vary. We estimate emotion semantics across a sample of 2474 spoken languages using “colexification”—a phenomenon in which languages name semantically related concepts with the same word. Analyses show significant variation in networks of emotion concept colexification, which is predicted by the geographic proximity of language families. We also find evidence of universal structure in emotion colexification networks, with all families differentiating emotions primarily on the basis of hedonic valence and physiological activation. Our findings contribute to debates about universality and diversity in how humans understand and experience emotion.

The paper titled Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure by Joshua Jackson, Joseph Watts, Teague Henry, myself, Peter Mucha, Robert Forkel, Simon Greenhill, Russell Gray, and Kristen Lindquist has has now appeared in Science.

Although quite a few things happened recently, I did not find much time to update the news feed, and I was surprised that my last update was made in November.

Anyway, yesterday, two blogposts appeared, my final post on the series on Open Problems in Computational Diversity Linguistics (available here), and a German blog post that elaborates about the topic patience and how much of impatience is needed in scientific research (Trotz der Ungeduld: Jonglieren im Wind).

In the week before, a paper discussing how to compare reconstruction systems appeared, titled "Beyond Edit Distances: Comparing linguistic reconstruction systems". The preprint is available online here.

Two papers were accepted by now: our paper on CLICS, Version 3, with Scientific Data and many coauthors (preprint here), and our paper on Sign language evolution with Justin Power and Guido Grimm with Royal Society Open Science (preprint here).

These are all the news for December, but it is possible that there will still be updates during this month.

Last week was a very busy week, with papers that had to be prepared and talks that had to be presented. Nevertheless, we managed to put the blogposts from 2018 online and share them with Humanities Commons. First the contributions to our blog on Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice are now available here, second, my contributions to the Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks for 2018 can be retrieved from this link.

In addition, I managed to submit a study on inter-linear-glossed text and our attempts to retro-standardize linguistic data. This study, carrried out together with Nathaniel A. Sims, titled "Towards a sustainable handling of inter-linear-glossed text in language documentation" has now also be posted on Humanities Commons in form of a preprint and can be found here.

Last not least, today appeared my 11th blogpost in the Genealogical World of Phylogenetic networks, this time dealing with the 10th (and last) problem in computational diversity linguistics. This post, discussing the "Typology of semantic promiscuity" can be found here.

Today I published the third blog post in our series on biological metaphors in linguistics. This time I am contrasting the processes involved in language change and in genetic evolution which cause differences or similarities between related or unrelated words or genes. You can read the blog post here.

Last week, we published the third big version of our Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications, CLICS³, available at clics.clld.org. In this version, we managed to double the number of languages and we also drastically increased the number of concepts. Many people helped in different ways to acquire the data. In order to make sure we acknowledge all of them, we prepared a CONTRIBUTORS.MD file on GitHub, in which you can see past and present editors, as well as all who have helped to contribute to the collection of the data of CLICS. Many thanks to all who helped to establish CLICS, in the past, and specifically also for version 3.

Last week, we announced version 2.2 of the Concepticon. The new version now includes as many as 275 different concept lists linked to our unified concept sets.

I also wrote a new German blogpost, this time about the review process, in which I ask "Wer begutachted eigentlich die Gutachter?" (Who reviews the reviewer, after all?), and which you can find here.

Yesterday I published a new post in our blog, discussing the importance and the advantages of the new approach to linguistic data that we constantly proposing. I illustrate such advantages by describing how I could reuse the data from CLICS, itself reusing data from Lexibank, to build a simple matrix and graph of semantic distance. The post can be found here.

Yesterday, my 9th blogpost on Open Problems in Computational Diversity Linguistics appeared, this time discussing the problems of establishing a typology of sound change processes. The blogpost, which is rather long this time, can be found here.

Today, there are news with respect to new releases to share. First, there is another blogpost in German, introducing the EvoBib reference browser, which offers references and citations for more than 3000 articles and books, related to historical linguistics, language contact, and linguistic typology, and was now officially released. The blogpost, titled «Wissensmanagment» quickly introduces the tool, and the tool itself can be browsed, or also downloaded on Zenodo or GitHub.

Furthermore, we released LingPy, version 2.6.5, which is now officially available through all typical channels.

In this week, a new blogpost, discussing my 8th problem of computational diversity linguistics appeared, this time focusing on the typology of semantic change.

In this week, we published two new blog posts in our CALC blog, both follow-ups from series that were started earlier in this year, one by myself, devoted to Feature-Based Alignment Analyses with LingPy and CLTS (2), and one by Nathanael E. Schweikhard, discussing Biological metaphors and methods in historical linguistics (2): Words and genes.

Additionally, Tim Bodt, who was visiting our group already several times, has now published all material from his trip to Nepal, during which he collected material on the Kusunda language. This trip was to a small part supported by our project, and Tim thanked us for the support by collecting a 250-item wordlist of Kusunda that we can compare with our database on Sino-Tibetan langauges. You can find a summary of the work (published by Aaley and Bodt), along with all links to the original data, which is free for download, here.

Last week, the Russian portal Sistemny Blok published an interview, in which we discussed computer-based, computer-assisted, and general language comparison, as well as the benefits of juggling for doing science. The interview, which was conducted in English and then translated to Russian, can be found here. I am very thankful to all involved in this, specifically Mariana Zorkina, who interviewed me. Furthermore, this enterprise helped me to find a new scientific blog with very interesting content, and I recommend to all who read Russian to have a look at the SysBlok.ru.

My article, discussing currently available methods for the automated studying of language contact, has now appeared in the journal Language and Linguistics Compass, titled Automated methods for the investigation of language contact situations, with a focus on lexical borrowing. Unfortunately, I could not afford the high costs for direct open access with the publisher. As a result, I placed my final version before copy-editing on Humanities Commons.

Furthermore, I managed to stick to my self-made promise and discuss the seventh problem of computational diversity linguistics in the eighth month of the year. This month, I discuss questions regarding the Statistical proof of language relationship.

Last not least, our workshop on Computer-assisted approaches to historical and typological language comparison, which was held last week, organized as part of the Annual Meeting of the SLE in Leipzig, turned out to be very nice, with a lot of presentations devoted to very different aspects of computer-assisted research.

Yesterday and today, I published two new blogposts. My German blogposts deals with predictions in the humanities, and specifically in linguistics, titled «Und nun zur Wörtervorhersage...»: Vorhersagen in der Sprachwissenschaft. The other blogpost is a tutorial on alignment analyses with LingPy and custom scoring functions based on the CLTS feature system, titled Feature-Based Alignment Analyses with LingPy and CLTS (1), and will be followed up by one or two more posts which present a full-fledged algorithm devoted to the topic.

Furthermore, our workshop on «Computer-assisted approaches in historical and typological language comparison» will be organized as part of the annual conference of the SLE (2019). For those interested in the specific speakers of this workshop, I made a small workshop website which shares the abstract, gives some information on the full description of the workshop, and also summarizes the speakers, their titles, and provides direct links to their abstracts at the official SLE website.

An interview, in which I talk about juggling and science, appeared three days ago in the Chinese online journal Zhìshifènzi (intellectuals). When reading this interview with help of automated translation, it nicely illustrates the limitations that computational approaches still have. My Chinese name Yóuhán 游函, which I chose back in 2005 because the pronunciation comes so close to my first name, is consequently translated as ``travel letter'' or similar, because the name is not recognizable as a standard name by the translation software. If you check the same interview (but with few errors in the text already corrected) on the We-Chat platform, you can also see a recent video in which I perform the pirouette with five clubs in a gym in Berlin. While this has nothing to do with science, I see it as one of the factors that allow me to pursue my research: Juggling is excellent for preventing pain in the back, resulting from sitting for too long a time in front of a computer. Therefore, the more I juggle in my free time, the more I can sit and program in my working time.

It is my great pleasure to announce that the Journal of Language Relationship has now published our special issue that reflects some of the work presented in our Old Chinese and Friends conference. All articles are freely available and can be found here. I am very thankful to George Starostin for the fantastic work done as an editor of this issue, with all articles being thoroughly checked and adjusted to journal style guides by him, and to Yunfan Lai for help in organizing both the conference and submission and reviews.

Today, a paper by Taraka Rama and me, titled "An Automated Framework for Fast Cognate Detection and Bayesian Phylogenetic Inference in Computational Historical Linguistics" appeared online in its final version, and you can find it here.

Furthermore, we released version 2.1 of Concepticon, now offering concept links to 250 different concept lists.

Finally, a blogpost devoted to the problem of the simulation of sound change, as part of my series on open problems in computational diversity linguistics, appeared today, and you can find it here.

Today, I released EvoBib, version 0.26, with now 3404 bibliographyic entries, and EvoRef, version 0.3, with now 4835 quotes from 2515 references. In addition to accessing the data via the web interfaces, they can also be downloaded from Zenodo, via this link for EvoBib and this link for EvoRef.

In addition, a paper that I wrote almost three years ago with Guillaume Jacques has now finally appeared. This paper, titled «Save the trees» discusses the advantages of tree models in historical linguistics. Due to open access restrictions, I can only offer the preprint of the paper, which has been available for download for quite some time from this link. A refined version can be found here.

Yesterday, our paper on Cross-Linguistic Transcriptoin Systems finally appeared online. In this paper, we explain how we established the Cross-Linguistic Transcription Systems (CLTS) database, which links different transcription systems and transcription datasets to a unified set of sounds, which are defined by a feature system. The paper, titled A cross-linguistic database of phonetic transcription systems, coauthored by Cormac Anderson, Tiago Tresoldi, Thiago Chacon, Anne-Maria Fehn, Mary Walworth, Robert Forkel, and myself, introduces the database and also discusses general ideas with respect to standardization efforts and traditions for linguistic transcription systems.

Tomorrow, June 28, 2019, Tiago Tresoldi, Mei-Shin Wu, and Nathanael E. Schweikhard will give a talk titled "Fundamentals of Computer-Assisted Language Comparison" at the National Taiwan University (NTU), in Taipei (Taiwan). Introduction to computational methods of language comparison, discussion on the software, methods, and interfaces developed by the CALC group, as well as illustrations of data annotation and modeling, will be presented, with a session for question & answers and pratical demonstrations.

Today, my monthly English blog post appeared, discussing problem number 5 of my list of open problems in computational diversity linguistics, this time devoted to the "Simulation of lexical change", which you can find here.

Furthermore, I released a beta-version of the PoePy library, a Python library devoted to quantitative task in the investigation of poetry, available on GitHub.

Last not least, Justin Power, Guido Grimm, and myself, finally managed to submit our pilot study on sign language evolution, titles "Evolutionary dynamics in the dispersal of sign languages". The preprint can be found here.

Already on Sunday I published a new German blog post, this time discussing the phenomenon of epenthesis and other sound change types in German and other languages, titled «Wissentschaft und Abenbrot: Einschübe und Aussetzer im Sprachwandel», available here.

Furthermore, two more drafts of accepted papers have been added to my list of forthcoming papers. The first draft is a comment on a forthcoming paper by Gerhard Jäger in the journal Theoretical Linguistics, discussing questions of comparing reconstruction systems. The draft, titled «Beyond Edit Distances: Comparing linguistic reconstruction systems» can be found here.

The second draft is a paper to appear in the Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, written together with Nathan W. Hill, presenting a new idea of handling Chinese character formation processes in the reconstruction of Old Chinese phonology. This draft, titled «Using Chinese character formation graphs to test proposals in Chinese historical phonology» can be found here.

I was very glad when I heard that the paper I wrote with Taraka Rama on "An automated framework for fast cognate detection and Bayesian phylogenetic inference in computational historical linguistics" has been accepted as a long paper for the ACL 2019 conference. Our preprint can be found here, and the code for the cognate detection algorithm can be found at GitHub/lingpy/bipskip.

At the same time, I was also notified that my paper with Tim Bodt on "Testing the predictive strength of the comparative method: An ongoing experiment on unattested words in Western Kho-Bwa langauges" has also been accepted by the journal Papers in Historical Phonology. The preprint can be found here, and the code has been registered with the Open Science Framework.

My English blogpost for may discusses phonological reconstruction as my fourth open problem in computational diversity linguistics and can be found here. Furthermore, a paper reviewing automated methods for contact inference in historical linguistics has now been officially accepted by Language and Linguistics Compass. You can find my most recent draft here.

This week we start a new blogpost series, focusing on metaphors and methods shared by historical linguistics and evolutionary biology. You can find the first post here.

Two more blogposts appeared this week. First, I decided to start writing a series on the background of our Sino-Tibetan Database of Lexical Cognates, which you can find here. Second, I published a German blogpost on the importance of baselines and benchmarks (gold standards) for testing and training of algorithms, which you can find here. In addition, a paper I wrote with Taraka Rama on fast cognate detection and fast phylogenetic reconstruction was now accepted as a long paper for the ACL conference this year. We'll still have to finalize the paper itself according to reviewer suggestions, but will upload a preprint as early as possible. The code for my fast cognate detection method can be found here.

Our paper in PNAS on the history of the Sino-Tibetan languages seems to have caught some media attention. As a result, I was asked to give a short interview on the matter, which already appeared on Tuesday in Deutschlandfunk, but is still available from their archive (see below on the website).

Furthermore, our paper on rhyme annotation, common work with Nathan W. Hill and Christopher Foster, which has been under review for some time, has now been accepted. Our final draft before it goes to production can be found here.

After four years of hard work, our study on the phylogeny and age of the Sino-Tibetan language family has finally appeared in PNAS. The article, which can be found here. A short video, in which I introduce our major findings can be found here. Our press release presenting some details of the study is available from this link, offered also in different translations.

To summarize our findings, here is what the abstract of the paper says:

The Sino-Tibetan language family is one of the world’s largest and most prominent families, spoken by nearly 1.4 billion people. Despite the importance of the Sino-Tibetan languages, their pre-history remains controversial, with ongoing debate about when and where they originated. To shed light on this debate we develop a database of comparative linguistic data, apply the linguistic comparative method to identify sound correspondences and establish cognates. We then use phylogenetic methods to infer the relationships among these languages and estimate the age of their origin and homeland. Our findings point to Sino-Tibetan originating with north Chinese millet farmers around 7200 B.P. and suggest a link to the late Cishan and the early Yangshao cultures.

The paper was based on a large collaborative effort, involving teams from Paris (Guillaume Jacques and Laurent Sagart from the CRLAO and Robin Ryder and Valentin Thouzeau from the Université Paris-Dauphine) and Jena (Simon J. Greenhill and Yunfan Lai). In addition, many people helped us in collecting the data, which can be freely accessed on Zenodo, or even directly inspected through the EDICTOR software.

Apart from the co-authors, I am also very thankful to the numerous contributors who shared data, and to the reviewing process, which was professional, challenging, and extremely fair.

With this study, we hope to contribute to the ongoing debate regarding the origin and spread of the Sino-Tibetan languages. Given that three teams were working in parallel on this question, with one study being published earlier in Nature two weaks ago, and one in preparation (preliminary results will be presented on a conference this week.

Following up on open problems in computational diversity linguistics, my English blogpost for April now discusses the third problem, the induction of sound laws, which has been largely neglected both in the classical and the computational literature. The post can be found here.

In addition, I would like to announce a new tool that I have created recently. I call it EvoRef, and the tool offers currently 4669 distinct quotes (including abstracts and comments) from 2383 different references on topics in historical linguistics, language typology, and evolution. The tool is organized in such a way that many of the references can already be found in EvoBib, although they may be occasionally missing. The tool can be used to search for my specific interpretation of linguistic literature, since it offers the keywords that I give to work I cited. As my original database also contains specific comments and evaluations, which I do not necessarily want to share in public, this official version only offers the raw quotes with comments being hidden. Given the huge number of inter-linked resources, also with occasional translations of non-English resources into English, I hope it will be useful for those interested in topics on language evolution and historical linguistics. You can find the tool at http://calc.digling.org/evoref/.

While working during the last weeks, I completely forgot to announce that the Concepticon was now released in its version 2.0, this time comprising as many as 240 different concept lists, and many mappings being refined in contrast to earlier version. Have fun exploring the resource at https://concepticon.clld.org.

And once I am already announcing this, I also forgot to mention that version 1.2 of the Cross-Linguistic Transcription Systems was now also released, and you will find it at https://clts.clld.org.

I am very thankful to all colleagues involved in the preparation of these sources.

I just published my monthly German blogpost for April, this time discussing questions of translation, specifically literal and adquate translation. You can find the post, titled «Wörtlichkeit, Freiheit, Adäquatheit und die Aufgabe der Übersetzer» here.

We published the first of a series of blog posts on how to use pyconcepticon, both as a library and as a command-line tool, for the semi-automatic mapping of concept lists to Concepticon. This first blog posts guides the readers through the command line tool, hinting at the internals of the library that will explored in more detail in the following post (to be published next week).

You can find the post here.

In the third part of a series of tutorial blogposts on the automatic inference of sound correspondence patterns across multilingual wordlists, I present how the Python code of the LingRex software package can be applied to the data of the TPPSR. You can find the post here.

The second problem in my series on open problems in computational diversity linguistics deals with the problem of automatic borrowing detection. While this may not seem to be per se a hard one, I think it is a huge problem speciically because there are not even standardized procedures in classical, qualitative historical linguistics for this task. You can find the blogpost here.

On Sunday, I published my monthly German blogpost, thist time discussing the problem of plagiarism in science: Von falschen Originalen und echten Kopien.

This week, I wrote another small blogpost, a primer on automatic sound correspondence pattern inference, or, more properly, a second post discussing the topic, this time showing how data from the Benchmark Database of Phonetic Alignments can be harvested and directly analyzed with EDICTOR. The post can be found here.

One month has past since I have shared news the last time. I have not been idle in the meantime, but did not find time in all my work to share any updates. Besides, I was writing papers, which are now under review, and will be shared online in due time, once I find time to prepare them in form of preprints.

I just would like to announce two more blogposts that I have written in February, the first one, in German, is devoted to potential errors in science which can -- nevertheless -- improve our knowledge, titled Darwin's Finkenschnäbel und der Nutzen des Irrtums. The second post follows up on my 10 open problems for diversity linguistics, and discusses why the problem of Automatic Morpheme Segmentation is such a huge problem for historical linguistics, and how it might be that we could tackle it in the future. This blog is titled.

I haven't shared many updates in January, as I was in holiday until the first half of January. In the meantime, however, a couple of blog posts appeared, and I'll quickly summarize them now.

First, already in December, an English blog post on «Patterns, processes, abduction, and consilience» appeared on The Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks. In this post, I discuss questions of what we can know and what we can infer from the data and the patterns we observe in historical linguistics. The post can be found here.

Second, earlier in January, I wrote a German blog post, discussing problems of fake news, fiction, and the potential crisis in journalism and science, which you can find here.

Third, another English post appeared on the phylogenetic networks blog, where I discuss Future challenges for computational diversity linguistics. I present 10 different problems, and I will try to comment on each of these 10 problems in more detail during the next 10 months.

Forth, I decided to start a new series of tutorial posts in our CALC blog. The idea, presented in the introductory post is to create something like a «Primer on automatic inference of sound correspondence patterns», presenting how the algorithm I present in a forthcoming paper can be used in practice.

I am very pleased to announce that the workshop on computer-assisted language comparison, which I submitted in November, has been accepted for the annual SLE conference next year in Leipzig. I just submitted the final version of our workshop description, which you can also find here.

Here is the abstract of the workshop:

The workshop invites papers that deal with computer-assisted (as opposed to pure computational or pure qualitative) approaches to historical and typological language comparison. Computer-assisted approaches are hereby understood as procedures involving different stages of qualitative and quantitative data analysis, ranging from the initial preparation of lexical or structural data, via automatic or manual annotation, up to qualitative or quantitative analysis, that yield a specific result, be it a linguistic reconstruction system linking proto-forms to aligned reflexes, a phylogeny that lists inferred word histories, or tools for exploratory data analysis. By focusing on computer-assisted approaches, we hope to foster a more intensive collaboration between classical and computational linguists. In addition to detailed descriptions of concrete tasks in historical and typological language comparison, we also encourage submissions dealing with data standards enhancing data sharing and reuse, as well as the presentation of purely qualitative approaches for which no computational solutions exist so far.

If you are working on topics that seem apt for this workshop, consider applying, by submitting an abstract for the SLE conference, where you specify our workshop (see here).

Last week, I published my monthly blog post in German, this time devoted to questions of open research, titled "Von hupenden Radlern und schludrigen Wissenschaftlern".

Today, another blog post appeared in our blog on tutorials for computer-assisted language comparison, this time devoted to Merging datasets with LingPy and the CLDF curation framework.

Together with Nathan W. Hill and Christopher Forster, I submitted a paper on rhyme annotation in Chinese historical phonology and beyond. You can find the draft here.

In addition, our paper presenting a database of cross-linguistic transcription systems was now finally accepted for publication with the Yearbook of the Poznań Linguistic Meeting. We now submitted our final version, which is also online available here. The source code accompanying this paper has now also been released and can be found on GitHub at cldf/clts. In addition, you can inspect the data here.

Together with Guido Grimm, I have published a new blog post devoted to the question of structural data in historical linguistics and how it should be used. You can find the blog here.

Furthermore, I was really pleased when I heard that my paper for the automatic inference of sound correspondence patterns was now officially accepted by the Computational Linguistics journal. I just submitted my final author edits, and uploaded the draft here. The code has now also been officially released, and you can test the lingrex package yourself, if you want.

Today, I published my second blog post on our project weblog. This time I talk about a semasiological approach to the study of word formation and argue for the use of a new term to denote the idea of concept-based type-frequency. You can find the blogpost here.

Today, I published my monthly German blogpost, this time discussing the question of language decay: Wer hat Angst vorm Sprachverfall?.

My article, entitled Relativisation in Wobzi Khroskyabs and the integration of genitivisation, is going to appear in the upcoming issue of Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area. In this article, the relativisation strategies in Wobzi Khroskyabs is described, and the historical pathway of the genitive relativisation in this language is hypothesised. You can view this article by clicking on the link above.

Today I published a new blog post in our tutorial blog, this time explaining how consonant clusters that recur in the languages of the world can be inferred with help of LingPy, based on data derived from the CLICS database. The tutorial can be found here.

Today, a new blogpost appeared, this time presenting some kind of a "making off" of Concepticon, where I present ideas "Towards a history of concept list compilation in historical linguistics" in the blog History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. I also formatted the text and submitted a PDF version to Zenodo, which you can find here.

Not all people will agree with my view, but I see the use of structural data as problematic when trying to either do phylogenetic reconstructio or to infer so far undemonstrated genetic relationships among languages. I have summarized my arguments in a blogpost, entitled Controversies about structural data in historical linguistics..

We plan on submitting a workshop proposal for computer-assisted language comparison at the SLE 2019 meeting in Leizpig. You find the detailed call for papers here.

Our paper describing the basic ideas underlying the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats initiative was finally published with the Scientific Data journal:

The amount of available digital data for the languages of the world is constantly increasing. Unfortunately, most of the digital data are provided in a large variety of formats and therefore not amenable for comparison and re-use. The Cross-Linguistic Data Formats initiative proposes new standards for two basic types of data in historical and typological language comparison (word lists, structural datasets) and a framework to incorporate more data types (e.g. parallel texts, and dictionaries). The new specification for cross-linguistic data formats comes along with a software package for validation and manipulation, a basic ontology which links to more general frameworks, and usage examples of best practices.

You can find the paper here.

It is surprising how many of the words in our languages are composed of other words. It is also surprising that linguistics has not yet come up with a term for the fact that it is specifically certain concepts that denote word forms which are then frequently reused throughout the lexicon of a language. I discuss this briefly in my monthly German blog post, titled Von Wortfamilien und promiskuitiven Wörtern.

Today, I published my first blog post on our project weblog, in which I propose a workflow for enhancing wordlists with morphological information. You can find the blogpost here.

During the last weekend, Tim Bodt, Nathan Hill, and me submitted a preregistration with the Open Science Framework. In this experiment, we used computer-assited techniques to predict the most likely pronunciations for words so far missing in Tim's corpus on Kho-Bwa languages. During fieldwork in November, Tim will try to verify how good our predictions are. The preregistered version of the experiment can be found here.

For the prediction, a new method for sound correspondence pattern inference was used, which I developed in close collaboration with Nathan Hill during the last three years. Algorithm and code are now also available, both in a preprint (which you can find here) and with GitHub (lingpy/lingrex).

On Monday, I published a new blogpost presenting a fast algorithm for cognate detection using Dolgopolsky's approach of matching consonant classes. The blogpost with an example using LingPy's test sets and basic data structures can be found here.

Yesterday, I published my monthly English blogpost, this time showing how structural data can be represented in th e CLDF format. We plan to publish follow-up posts where we show how this data can be analyzed with network approaches. You can find the blogpost here.

Yesterday, I published my monthly German blogpost, this time discussing the problem of using etymologies in speeches for rhetorical reasons. You can find the post, titled "Von hohen Zeiten und Schlägen in Raten: Vorsicht vor Alltagsetymologien!" here.

A paper by Abbie Hantgan and me, where we present the preliminaries for a computer-assisted analysis of Bangime and its relation to the Dogon languages in Mali, has now been accepted with the Journal of Language Contact. The paper presents a new approach for automatic borrowing detection based on a comparison of different algorithms for automatic cognate detection. Although the approach is rather simple, it seems to be efficient enough to provide initial hints regarding major borrowing partners in language contact scenarios, and it also shows that the mysterious Bangime language remains an isolate, at least with the methods we have at our disposal by now. The draft of the paper is available here.

Last Monday, I published a blogpost presenting how structural data can be represented in CLDF format. The blog can be found here, and it includes two datasets that were published before, which are now provided in CLDF format.

Yesterday, I published a new English blogpost, this time introducing a new term for cognate relations in historical linguistics: "regular cognates". The concept is crucial for our terminology, although we are only beginning to develop methods to assess the regularity properly within computer-assisted frameworks. You can find the blogpost here.

Our paper introducing the CLDF (Cross-Linguistic Data Formats, https://cldf.clld.org) initiative has been accepted by Nature's Scientific Data journal:

Forkel, R., J.-M. List, S. Greenhill, C. Rzymski, S. Bank, M. Cysouw, H. Hammarström, M. Haspelmath, G. Kaiping, and R. Gray (forthcoming): Cross-Linguistic Data Formats, advancing data sharing and re-use in comparative linguistics. Scientific Data.

The paper introduces the basic ideas behind the CLDF standard and provides some examples and background information. I have uploaded the final draft we submitted to Nature here.

I just submitted a first (beta) version of the SinoPy library for quantitative tasks in Chinese historical linguistics. SinoPy is an attempt to provide useful functionality for users working with Chinese dialects and Sino-Tibetan language data and struggling with tasks like converting characters to Pinyin, analysing characters, or analysing readings in Chinese dialects and other SEA languages.

You can find the library on GitHub, on PyPi, or on Zenodo.

Our paper presenting the CLICS² database of cross-linguistic colexifications has now appeared online officially. Unfortunately, the production team of DeGruyter messed up the online version of the article, so Chinese characters are not readable, and Russian characters are turned upside down. Luckily, the PDF version is correct. The paper is open access and can be accessed here.

I published a new cookboor for the usage of the pyclics API with our blog for tutorials and methodological discussions on CALC, which you can find here.

I just published my German blog post for August, this time reflecting about word histories, and how social factors may influence the history of words. You find the post here.

My monthly blogpost in English just appeared online. This time, I am introducing the idea of cross-linguistic colexification networks (as they appear in our CLICS database): Networks of polysemous and homophonous words.

I just wrote another German blog for July, this time focusing on homophony, polysemy, and the game that we used to play when I was young, called Teekesselchen "teapot": Netzwerke aus Teekesselchen.

The CLICS database of cross-linguistic colexifications has now officially been released in a new version, called CLICS², available at http://clics.clld.org. The database features a multitude of new data points and a completely new framework for data curation and data analysis. What is new in this new database is also documented in a forthcoming paper, which will soon be published with Linguistic Typology. You can find the draft of that paper here.

Our tutorial on LingPy (common work with Mary Walworth, Simon Greenhill, Tiago Tresoldi, and Robert Forkel) has now appeared online, published with the Journal of Language Evolution. The article is open access and can be downloaded or viewed online under this link. It reflects the current state of the art of our LingPy in its 2.6 version.

Today, my monthly post for the phylogenetic networks blog appeared, this time discussing Horizontal and vertical language comparison, that is, the differences in comparing languages internally or externally.

Last week I published a short info on a dataset we developed for our project, containing all the parallel translations in the English Wiktionary. The post can be found here and the data is available on Zenodo as Parallel Translations from the English Wiktionary.

Last week, I wrote my monthly German post, titled Huhu, Digga! Geschlechtsunterschiede in der Sprache. I discuss recent phenomena of gender differences in the German language and their potential implications for the debate in German about "fair language" ("gerechte Sprache").

After almost two months of preparation, our CALC team is now busy preparing the first blogposts for our new weblog on Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice. In the future, we hope to publish minimaly one post per month, targeting different topics, including methodological discussion notes and fresh tutorials on software, data curation, and data analysis.

On Monday, I published my traditional monthly blog post for the Phylogenetic Networks Blog, this time Comparing reconstruction systems in historical linguistics.

I am now packing my stuff, getting ready for a summer fieldtrip in Sichuan. I will be working on Khroskyabs dialects (hopefully several new dialects). I will focus on basically everything, from phonology to morphosyntax. I will also keep an eye on the expressions of geography in this language, as well as animal calling sounds and other interesting stuff.

We have completely relaunched the database of cross-linguistic colexifications with help of the CLLD framework, which is now available as a beta-release at http://clics.clld.org. Our paper (together with Simon Greenhill, Cormac Anderson, Thomas Mayer, Tiago Tresoldi, and Robert Forkel) introducing the database, titled "An improved database of cross-linguistic colexifications" is available in draft form here.

Yesterday, I published my traditional German blog post for May. This time, I discuss different aspects of linguistic variations: Ur-in-stinkt: Grenzen und Chancen der Schriftsprache.

Our tutorial for the LingPy library, which describes in detail how cognate detection and alignment analyses can be carried out with help of LingPy 2.6, has now finally been accepted for publication with the Journal of Language Evolution. This tutorial is supposed to represent the state of the art of what can be done with LingPy and how it should be done. It was prepared in collaboration with Mary Walworth, Simon Greenhill, Tiago Tresoldi, and Robert Forkel, and reflects the strong collaboration between different members of our Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution and our CALC research group. The draft of the paper can be found here and the tutorial itself is available from GitHub.

Our workshop, Old Chinese and Friends, held from 26/04/2018 to 27/04/2018, has enjoyed high appreciations from the participants.

17 renowned scholars from all over the world participated in the workshop and had their say. The presentations covered a wide range of domains concerning Old Chinese, including historical phonology, morphology, methodology and paleography. New ideas, opinions and hypotheses have successfully found their way to Jena, a city which can now be named the home of historical linguistics.

The participants were also amazed at how much time they were given for discussion at the end of each day. The discussion sessions were full of insightful questions and comments.

The workshop embraced language variety, as both English and Chinese presentations and discussions were accepted.

Old Chinese and Friends is a follow-up workshop of the 2016 Recent Advances in Old Chinese Historical Phonology at SOAS, University of London, UK. The aim of this workshop is to share new findings and results in the field of the Old Chinese language.

Apart from this exciting event, the month of April has also seen the acceptance of my paper on "Relativisation in Wobzi Khroksyabs and the integration of genitivisation" with Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area. This article is the first contribution on sentential construction of the Khroskyabs language (more info coming soon).

Now that our group has finally been assembled (more info on that regard soon), we are ready to spread the word by presenting a lecture on computer-assisted language comparison at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena during the summer term, regularly on Tuesdays from 14 to 16 o'clock.

The target audience of the lecture are linguists with a background in historical linguistics and the interest to learn more about computational approaches. For those interested in joining, you can check out the seminar plan or the official announcement of the lecture with FSU Jena.

I am pleased to announce that the FAZ article I mentioned in a previous post has now appeared online, where you can freely read it: Wie erforscht man Ursprünge?.

Furthermore, my English blogpost for March just appeared. This time, I try to explain why sound change is so peculiar, and why it cannot be simplified with changes in DNA or protein sequences due to mutations: It's the system, stupid!.

On March 14, an article appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, discussing the usefulness and appropriateness of computational approaches in historical linguistics, titled "Bäume der Erkenntnis", by Wolfgang Krischke. The article also presents our department and mentions our attempts to work on a reconciliation of computational and classical historical linguistics. Unfortunately, I cannot share it at the moment, since it did not appear online, but if it does, we will announce it here.

During the weekend, I found time to write my monthly German blog post. This time, I discuss how speakers of a given language imitate or joke about speakers from other languages. This topic is linguistically interesting, since it may reveal quite a few things about the speakers who joke about foreign languages, as I try to show with German jokes about the Chinese language. The post can be found here.

Yesterday, an interview on our work on automatic cognate detection from early last year (List, Greenhill, and Gray 2017) appeared online at the Latest Thinking Platform.

After two years of hard work on API and data, we have finally managed to release version 1.1 of the Concepticon resource. In addition to the general application, we also offer a standalone app with enhanced search functionalities in currently seven languages, which can be found here.

Furthermore, we just submitted our final version (before the final proofs) of an paper that will appear some time later in 2018 with the provocative title Save the trees: Why we need tree models in historical linguistics (and when we should apply them).

Last not least, a short paper on the question Are automatic methods for cognate detection good enough for phylogenetic reconstruction (Taraka Rama, myself, Johannes Wahle, and Gerhard Jäger) was now accepted as a short paper to be presented in form of a poster at the NAACL conference. We're currently revising the draft, but we will try to put a draft close to the final version soon. The results indicate that especially the simpler methods may perform surprisingly well, although we could, unfortunately, only check the topology.

Today, my regularly monthly English blog post appeared. This time, it discusses the problem of excessive synonymy in linguistic datasets and its implication for phylogenetic reconstruction: Tossing coins: linguistic phylogenies and extensive synonymy .

On Saturday, I published another German blog post. This time about kitchen etymologies in times of elections, titled Konservativ kommt wirklich nicht von Konserve.

Yesterday, I finished preparing a paper that will be presented at this year's LFK Young Scholars Symposium in Taipei. It deals with new network approaches to the discipline of Historical Chinese Phonology, including networks of Chinese character formation and networks of Chinese sound glosses. A draft form of the paper can be found here.

It was in some sense last minute (but planned as such before) to write my monthly blogpost for David Morrison's blog on phylogenetic networks in the last week of January. This has now been done (also thanks to David's help in making my English and the story in general more readable), and you can find my blogpost on pronunciation networks in Chinese phonology online.

I just finished my regular German blog post for January, this time on Terry Pratchett's Eintagsfliege and the question whether language change and language decay are the same phenomenon (which they aren't, of course).

I would like to point to a call for papers for the journal "Computational Linguistics" on "Computational approaches in historical linguistics after the quantitative turn", guest-edited by Taraka Rama, Simon J. Greenhill, Harald Hammarström, Gerhard Jäger, and myself.

The deadline is July 15, 2018, and detailed information can be in this PDF.

A week earlier than normal, my final blog posts for this year have now appeared, the German one is titled Die Angst des Jongleurs vorm Fallenlassen and discusses the problem of letting things go (especially if one tries to juggle). The English one is titled The art of doing science: alignments in historical linguistics and discusses what we should keep in mind when using alignments in historical linguistics.

Our research project offers three positions for three years each, two for doctoral students, and one for a post-doc (the post-doc position is initially for two years with an option for a one-year extension after positive evaluation after the first year). Starting date is April 2018, and deadline for the submission of applications is end of January. The call for post-docs with all details, can be found here and the call for doctoral studens can be found here.

During the last days, we managed to finish two new blogpost. The first is a follow-up from our earlier blogpost on animal names, this time devoted to goats and sheep. The second blogpost (in German) is devoted to "hybrid pronunciations", exemplified with help of the debate about the Jamaica coalition in Germany.

I would also like to announce that our upcoming workshop on "Old Chinese and Friends" is gaining more structure (to take place from 26-27 of April, 2018, in Jena), and we have just managed to launch the project website along with the call for abstracts online.

We just released LingPy 2.6, which in addition to some smaller changes that may prove useful was fully concentrated on stabilizing the behavior of the algorithms and making the package easier to use.

Documentation of the package can be found, as usually, at http://lingpy.org, and the package itself can be downloaded from the traditional channels, be it Zenodo, GitHub, or PyPi.

My German blog post for this month is devoted to the case system in Russian, titled Ein Fall für Tee. In this post, I discuss how difficult it is in linguistics to identify true regularities without exceptions.

In addition, my lecture series which I gave at Tianjin university is now available online. You can download the full lecture here.

My monthly post for The Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks also appeared. This time, I collaborated with Guido Grimm to investigate cross-linguistic naming patterns for domesticated animals, like cat, dog, goat, and sheep.

On a last-minute-note I managed to write my monthly German blogpost for September, which was published last Saturday and deals with freedom and obligation in languages: Wahlpflicht und Wahlfreiheit in der Sprache.

You may further notice, that we have added a events section to this website, in which we list upcoming and past events which were carried out as part of the CALC research project.

Two days ago, I wrote another blogpost, this time in Arguments from authority, and the Cladistic Ghost, in historical linguistics. This may look like an offensive argument I make there, but my major intention was to draw the attention to the fact that our "classical" comparative method was never classical in any sense, as it is just a label we use to denote what we do to compare languages, and that, in the light of new approaches, we should not be too dismissive, but rather try to work harder on integrated, computer-assisted frameworks, which will hopefully enable us to understand better, how our languages evolved into their current shape.

The DLCE (Cormac Anderson, Paul Heggarty) CALC (Johann-Mattis List), and Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Adrian Simpson) are co-organizing a workshop as part of the Poznań Linguistic Meeting on Monday, September 18. For more information, see the workshop website which has just been launched.

I am proud to announce that a paper in which me and Nathan Hill discuss Challenges of Annotation and Analysis in Computer-Assisted Language Comparison has now been published online and can be freely downloaded form this link. The paper discusses general challenges of annotation for the purpose of historical language comparison and also introduces first ideas on how to solve these challenges. Here is the abstract:

The use of computational methods in comparative linguistics is growing in popularity. The increasing deployment of such methods draws into focus those areas in which they remain inadequate as well as those areas where classical approaches to language comparison are untransparent and inconsistent. In this paper we illustrate specific challenges which both computational and classical approaches encounter when studying South-East Asian languages. With the help of data from the Burmish language family we point to the challenges resulting from missing annotation standards and insufficient methods for analysis and we illustrate how to tackle these problems within a computer-assisted framework in which computational approaches are used to pre-analyse the data while linguists attend to the detailed analyses.

Last week, I gave a radio interview with Deutschlandfunk Nova in which I tried my best to answer questions regarding language diversity and its driving forces. The interview, which was broadcasted yesterday, can also be found online under this link.

I just finalized the first version of our website for the Panel on "Languages as Keys to Our Past" which we organize for the 33. Deutscher Orientalistentag „Asien, Afrika und Europa“. The website can be found here. Later, we will also link the slides of all speakers in PDF format.

The DLCE and CALC are organizing a panel on the Deutscher Orientalistentag, which will take place in Jena this year (September 18-22). On September 21, from 9am to 1pm scientists from the institute and external guests will share and discuss their thoughts on the topic "Languages as keys to our past".

We will soon provide more information on the list of speakers and their abstracts.

I wrote two new blogposts in August, one in German on the benefits of using alignments and similar visualization techniques more broadly in the media, which you can find here, and one in English, where I discuss the problem of unattested character states in phylogenetic reconstruction, specifically in linguistics, which you can find here.

Hi there. I defended my thesis back in June, but after a large gap, I failed to motivate myself to upload it online. Now I finally did it. You may now have a look at my thesis here. Have fun!

Last week, I visited the Human Document Project 2017 in Freiburg, a project that seeks to preserve information about humans beyond the existence of the human race. As scify as this may sound on the first sight, as interesting it is, how many different questions and disciplines need to be involved into the plan of creating a time capsule that could witness of our existence even if we, that is, humanity, no longer exists. They invited philosophers, artists, technicians, data-experts, informaticians, physicists, and also me, as a linguist, whose job it was to give a rough overview on linguistic diversity and how we try to represent our knowledge about it. Although my talk, titled Storing our knowledge of linguistic diversity: Towards the standardization of cross-linguistic data formats did not involve the longer perspective of the next million years, I had the impression that it triggered the interest of the colleagues. While I remain sceptical about the general usefulness of science fiction questions in science, I have to admit that the day I spent in Freiburg was very inspiring, as I learned so many new things. Maybe, in the end, this is even the more important aspect of the HUDOC project: bringing together people from different disciplines and having them talk with each other...

It is my pleasure to welcome Yunfan Lai as a post-doc in the CALC project. He has a lot of experience in working with Sino-Tibetan languages and devoted his PhD to Khroskyabs, a very interesting branch of Sino-Tibetan whose history is still not clearly understood. As a member of CALC, Yunfan will pursue his studies on Khroskyabs and related varieties, and also provide help to uncover the mysterious history of Sino-Tibetan.

Having been traveling for about two weeks, interrupted by a talk I gave in Cologne, I am now back at work and finally find time to announce some news on what happened recently. First, there are two new blogposts I wrote, one in English on similarities in linguistics, a follow-up to a blogpost I devoted to the same topic earlier this year. The other blogpost in German is devoted to impoliteness (Unhöflichkeit) in Chinese and other languages. Second, there is the talk I gave together with Nathan W. Hill in Cologne, on a workshop on the regularity of sound change, organized by Eugen Hill and Robert Mailhammer. In our talk, titled "Computer-assisted approaches to linguistic reconstruction" , we outlined a new framework for automated linguistic reconstruction which we illustrated with examples from the Burmish languages.

From Friday, 30th of June, until last Friday, 7th of July, I was giving three talks on three different topics. It started with a summary on the potential of networks approaches in Old Chinese reconstruction in Paris, after which I was very surprised that many scholars seem to support the idea of handling Chinese character formation with directed networks (and I hope that I will find time to address this soon, even if only in a small example). After that, I gave a talk in Liège on colexifications and cross-linguistic polysemies, and how we plan to update the CLICS database when we launch CLICS 2.0. Finally, I introduced some basic ideas on how to handle lexical and etymological data within the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats initiative, focusing specifically on annotation and analysis. Although it was quite exhaustive to prepare all these talks, I am glad that I scheduled them for this time, since it forced me to push a couple of important projects, such as cross-linguistic colexifications, and the cross-linguistic data formats, which are all central for computer-assisted language comparison in general, and also important for Sino-Tibetan in specific.

After one week in Jena, where I'll try to catch up with the work I could not finish yet, I'll finally have two weeks of holidays until beginning of August, interrupted only from another talk in Cologne next week on Friday, in which me and Nathan Hill will present some interesting new work on Burmish languages (I'll report later in more detail).

I have published a couple of new papers recently, but since they go back to my former research project and were not directly developed as part of the CALC project, I do not list them in the list of papers. They are, however, quite important for our research, since they both deal with Old Chinese reconstruction.

The first paper is in "Using network models to analyze Old Chinese rhyme data" and will soon officially appear in the Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics. In the meantime, you can find my author's copy here.

The second paper is on "Vowel purity and rhyme evidence in Old Chinese reconstruction" (common work with my colleagues from Paris and London, Jananan S. Pathmanathan, Eric Bapteste, Philippe Lopez, and Nathan W. Hill) finally came out today, and you can find the PDF for download here.

I also wrote two more blog posts, both devoted to language comparison in general and my view on computer-assisted language comparison in particular. The first blog post (in English) is titled "Trees do not necessarily help in linguistic reconstruction" can be found here, and the second one deals with sound change and explains them with help of tooth-loss in comic books and can be found here.

Two new papers have been accepted during the last two weeks, and I am very glad about both publications, since they cover topics that touch the core of my project on computer-assisted language comparison.

The first is joint work with Nathan W. Hill (SOAS, London), and titled "Challenges of annotation and analysis in computer-assisted language comparison: A case study on Burmish languages". In this paper, we point to general annotation challenges when analysing South-East Asian languags in which compounding is frequent and sound correspondences are often hard to discover. We present a new database of cognate sets across 8 Burmish languages, all coded for partial cognacy, and consistently aligned. The final version of the paper which we submitted as our final version to the Yearbook of the Poznań Linguistic Meeting is available here.

The second paper is joint work with Gerhard Jäger (University Tübingen), and concentrates on a problem which is often overlooked in the literature, namely the problem of how well current algorithms infer which word forms where used to express a given concept in ancestral, unattested languages. This is not a trivial problem, and we only address it from the perspective of the classical lexicostatistical word lists, where we test on three datasets (Indo-European, Austronesian, and Chinese) how well different algorithms infer the ancestral states as they are predicted by the gold standard (the proto-forms provided along with the datasets). It turns out that the algorithms do not perform very well (unfortunately, MLN, an algorithm on which I worked a lot myself, performs even worst), but when looking at the gold standard in detail, we realized that many of the errors are due to problems with the gold standards, which are themselves quite inconsistent and not very trustworthy. As a result, we think that using ancestral state reconstruction methods for this purpose of "onomasiological reconstruction" might actually really help to get a better estimate. The draft of the paper can be found here.

My DFG-funded research project on Vertical and lateral aspects of Chinese dialect history officially ended on December 31, 2016. From January 2015 until December 2016 I had two very interesting but also challenging years during which I made acquaintance with many different scholars from different disciplines and countries but also with many new approaches and methods to historical linguistics and related disciplines.

Having submitted my final report in April (first time for a long time I wrote in German again), and hoping that the reviewers do not have anything grave to complain about, I now published the report online with Zenodo, and you can find it online here.

In case you wonder why I recommend this final report in the context of the CALC project, the answer is simple: Much of the ideas that I put into the project application for the CALC project were developed while I was in Paris, funded by the DFG, so in some sense, the SinDial project on Chinese dialects was the root of CALC.

Last week, we had a spring school on Quantitative Methods here in Jena. This is an annual event, and it was the second time that it took place, with Fiona Jordan organizing the main event, and many interesting scientists coming here as tutors or students for one full week (seven days), which was quite exhausting but also very interesting. This time, I gave a tutorial on LingPy, introducing the basic ideas of automatic sequence comparison and how it can be used to get started on computer-assisted work flows. You will find the tutorial online here in form of an Ipython Notebook, but you can likewise download the pdf or follow my introductory slides. All in all, this tutorial will provide you with all the most recent information needed to start making your own analyses with LingPy.

On Thursday, last week, we had a mini-workshop on poetry for which we invited colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and from the University of Zurich. It may look strange on first sight why poetry would matter for computer-assisted language comparison, but the poetic tradition of rhyming in the history of Chinese in fact plays a crucial role for the reconstruction of the oldest stages of the languages. I myself devoted two recent studies to the application of network approaches to study Old Chinese phonology which are currently in the final phase of editing and will hopefully appear soon (the draft for one study can be found here). In my talk, I presented this research quickly (the slides are here), and pointed to future questions on the dynamics underlying the development of poetic traditions from a cross-linguistic and historical perspective.

The other speakers discussed many interesting topics, ranging from empirical studies on poetry and how one can annotate the important factors that constitute poetic speech (Winfried Menninghaus and Christine Knoop, MPI-AE), via the automatic detection of rhyme patterns in German poetry (Thomas Haider MPI-AE), up to tquestions of language contact and cultural exchange (Paul Widmer, UZH), and the co-evolution of linguistic and poetic forms (Cormac Anderson, MPI-SHH). Our discussions during the talks were long, and since we had to stop at some point, there was no time for the talk by Olivier Morin (MPI-SHH) on "poetry as super-week communication". This was a definit loss, as I saw when Olivier shared his slides afterwards, but luckily we are working in the same department, and nothing will prevent us to go on with discussions and exchange of ideas.

We all decided to stay in close contact and keep each other informed on future ideas as well as concrete research, and it is quite likely that at some point in the not-so-far future, I will present more of this here.

We had an interesting small workshop in Zürich where my former colleagues from Paris, Laurent Sagart, Guillaume Jacques, and Yunfan Lai, with whom I pursue the goal to establish a larger lexicostatistic database of Sino-Tibetan languages, as well as people from Balthasar Bickel's team were present. We presented our respective work we have done so far, and I myself gave a talk on my ideas regarding a Sino-Tibetan Lexicostatistic Database. We will all keep collaborating in the future and potentially organize a second meeting, either in Paris or in Jena, later during this year.

Next week, I will attend the conference of the European Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics. After Lyon in 2012, this is my second EACL, and I will be involved in two presentations, one together with Gerhard Jäger and Pavel Sofroniev on automatic cognate detection, and one where I present the current state of my EDICTOR tool for computer-assisted language comparison.

In time with the official start of the project, we are glad to announce that the official project website is now online. It is without question that this website will be refined during the project duration, but the basic infrastructure is now there, and those interested in our project will be able to follow our news.