Having successfully defended my habilitation in February this year, I have now gained a new affiliation as a Privatdozent at the Institut für Orientalistik, Indogermanistik, Ur- und Frühgeschichtliche Archäologie at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. This means that I will give at least one seminar per semester from now on at the FSU Jena, and my current seminar on lexical change has already started.

Furthermore, EvoBib Version 1.4.0 was published yesterday, containing some 200 more entries in the bibliography and numerous new quotes, all assembled during the past months.

We revised our manuscript for the article on "Linking Norms, Ratings, and Relations of Words and Concepts Across Multiple Language Varieties." An updated version of our preprint (Version 2) is now available on PsyArXiv (click here)

Tjuka, A., Forkel, R., & List, J. (2021, May 4). Linking Norms, Ratings, and Relations of Words and Concepts Across Multiple Language Varieties. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/tgw3z

Today I published a new German blog post, titled Parallele Evolution in der Benennung von Unverpacktläden. At the same time, two papers appeared online. The first one is a prediction study with T. A. Bodt, published in Diachronica:

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, to predict the most likely phonetic realisations of the missing forms in our data, by making systematic use of the information on sound correspondences in words that were potentially cognate with the missing forms. This procedure yielded a list of hypothetical reflexes of previously identified cognate sets, which we first preregistered as an experiment on the prediction of unattested word forms and then compared with actual word forms elicited during secondary fieldwork. In this study we first describe the workflow which we used to predict hypothetical reflexes and the process of elicitation of actual word forms during fieldwork. We then present the results of our reflex prediction experiment. Based on this experiment, we identify four general benefits of reflex prediction in historical language comparison. These comprise (1) an increased transparency of linguistic research, (2) an increased efficiency of field and source work, (3) an educational aspect which offers teachers and learners a wide plethora of linguistic phenomena, including the regularity of sound change, and (4) the possibility of kindling speakers’ interest in their own linguistic heritage.

The second study is based on our initial experiments with interlinear-glossed text, published in TALLIP, together with N. Sims and R. Forkel, which is not available in open access, but our authors copy can be found here:

While the amount of digitally available data on the worlds’ languages is steadily increasing, with more and more languages being documented, only a small proportion of the language resources produced are sustainable. Data reuse is often difficult due to idiosyncratic formats and a negligence of standards that could help to increase the comparability of linguistic data. The sustainability problem is nicely reflected in the current practice of handling interlinear-glossed text, one of the crucial resources produced in language documentation. Although large collections of glossed texts have been produced so far, the current practice of data handling makes data reuse difficult. In order to address this problem, we propose a first framework for the computer-assisted, sustainable handling of interlinear-glossed text resources. Building on recent standardization proposals for word lists and structural datasets, combined with state-of-the-art methods for automated sequence comparison in historical linguistics, we show how our workflow can be used to lift a collection of interlinear-glossed Qiang texts (an endangered language spoken in Sichuan, China), and how the lifted data can assist linguists in their research.

Yesterday, we released the Cross-Linguistic Transcription Systems (https://clts.clld.org) in a new version, which also came along with some changes in the presentation of the data in the CLLD application, which Robert Forkel added during the past days.

On Tuesday, I released EDICTOR 2.0, and on Wednesday, I published a blog post discussing some of the new features, titled Using EDICTOR 2.0 to Annotate Language-Internal Cognates in a German Wordlist.

Yesterday we released LingPy 2.6.7, which you can find at https://pypi.org/project/lingpy (documentation at https://lingpy.github.io). The release does not introduce new features but guarantees compatibility with Python 3.9.

A new paper by myself just appeared, which focuses on the verbal inflection chain of Siyuewu Khroskyabs, a Gyalrongic language (Trans-Himalayan). Siyuewu Khroskyabs goes against two general typological tendencies: first, as an SOV language, it shows an overwhelming preference for prefixes, which is rarely reported typologically; second, the inflectional prefixes in the outer slots are older than those in the inner slots, which is the reverse case of most languages. In this paper, I first identify distinct historical layers within the inflectional prefixes, and then focus on two of the prefixes, də- ‘even’ and “ɕə- ‘Q’ whose evolutionary pathways are relatively clear. The essential part of the hypothesis is that the prefixes originate from enclitics which could be attached to the end of a preverbal chain, originally loosely attached to the verb stem. The preverbal chain later became tightly attached to the verbal stem and eventually became a part of it as a chain of prefixes. As a result, the original enclitics are reanalysed as prefixes. The integration of preverbal morphemes is responsible for the prefixing preference in Modern Siyuewu Khroskyabs. However, despite this superficial prefixing preference, Siyuewu Khroskyabs underlyingly favours postposed morphemes. By following the general suffixing tendency, this language finally managed to create a typologically rare, overwhelmingly prefixing verbal template.

The author's version of the paper can be found here

On Sunday, my German blog post for March appeared, this time discussing the indeterminacy in language , communication. You can find the post here. At the same time, a review paper by Cara L. Evans, Simon J. Greenhill, Joseph Watts, Carlos A. Botero, Russell D. Gray, Kathryn R. Kirby, and myself appeared, discussing "Uses and abuses of tree thinking in cultural evolution. In contributed the part on incomplete lineage sorting to this paper, which you can find as a preprint here.

Today, a new blog post in our 'How to do X in linguistics?' series was published. In the post, I describe our review process for adding concept lists to the Concepticon GitHub repository. The post shows how a collaborative review workflow ensures data validity and it is available here.

Today, a new tutorial blogpost appeared, focusing on how to link a particular complex dataset to the Concepticon here. In addition, a new paper by Joshua Conrad Jackson, Joseph Watts, Curtis Puryear, Ryan Drabble, Kristen Lindquist, and myself. The study, titled "From text to thought: How analyzing language can advance psychological science" will appear in "Perspectives on Psychological Science". The draft is available here.

Today, a new tutorial blogpost appeared, this time focusing on how to work with the data for the World Atlas of Language Structures in CLDF formats. You can find the post here.

Yesterday, I wrote my monthly German blog post for February, this time concentrating on expressions for "thirst" and what triggers thirst in our brains. You can find the blog post here.

We are pleased and sad at the same time that Tiago Tresoldi, who worked in the CALC project as a post-doc for almost three years, is leaving the project to pursue a post-doc project in Uppsala. Given that we are currently finalizing some studies that have not been published or submitted yet during Tiago's presence in our project, this is not the last time, Tiago will feature in our list of authors. For those interested in seeing what Tiago will be working on in the future, I recommend to follow his personal website, where he will share his new ideas on the analysis of the cultural transmission of text traditions.

Today, I submitted a new preprint, titled "Chances and Challenges of Quantitative Approaches in Chinese Historical Phonology". The study was submitted for the inclusion in a Festschrift for the 120th birthday of the famous linguist Li Fang-Kuei.

The field of Chinese Historical Phonology is traditionally dealing with a large number of complex and diverse types of data. While the data diversity can be conveniently dealt with in qualitative approaches, computational possibilities that have arisen during the past two decades offer new possibilities and new challenges for the field. In the study, I will summarize the chances and challenges which we face in the discipline and point to some suggestions for future work. While not being able to provide a direct solution for most issues of data handling and standardization, I hope that this study can contribute to a broader discussion about data and standards in the field of Chinese Historical Phonology.

The study has been submitted as a preprint to Humanities Commons.

I wrote a blog post about how to organize a journal club. The post is intended for someone who wants to start their own journal club or for someone who is unsure what to expect when they join our journal club. I share my experience and some tips here.

I wrote a new German blog post for January that discusses how important it is to be careful when seemingly detecting patterns, given that our mind often finds patterns where there are none in reality. This is exemplified with examples from etymology. You can find the post here.

I wrote a new blog post that just appeared in our blog on Computer-Assisted Language comparison, titled How to Handle Semantic Data with Tables. The blog post introduces basic practices used in the Concepticon project to handle semantic data.

Different people might have different opinions about the difficulty in learning a particular language. This heavily depends on the learner's linguistic background, learning experience and exposure to the target language. However, if we forget about all those noises, and solely focus on morphological paradigms alone, it is assumed that all languages are not as messy as they appear to be. This is called "the conditional low entropy conjecture", first proposed by Farrell and Malouf (2013), stating that morphology is in general organized, thus showing a low overall conditional entropy. Bonami and Beniamine (2016) developped a new method, called the "implicative entropy", in order to measure the degree of morphological organization in language. They showed that French and European Portuguese have very low implicative entropies in terms of morphology.

It would have been interesting to see how implicative entropies are in Gyalrongic languages that are famous for their complex morphology. In a new paper that was just published (Lai 2021), I used Bonami and Beniamine's (2016) method to measure the implicative entropy of Siyuewu Khroskyabs, a West-Gyalrongic language. The result shows that the degree of morphological organization of Khroskyabs is relatively high, that is, the forms are more or less predictable, if we consider the high-low threshold of 1 bit: the entropies are generally lower than 1. However, if we compare the Siyuewu results to those for French and for Portuguese, we observe that the entropies exhibited in Siyuewu are significantly higher (sometimes by three or four folds). Although it might be inapproriate to compare the results directly, we can still claim that Siyuewu is indeed morphologically more complex.

The reason behind the complexity seems to be due to the evolution of the language. The same phoneme in an earlier stage evolved into different modern reflexes under different conditions, creating irregularities, and analogical change is yet to be at work to clear the mess. Therefore, the result implies that Siyuewu Khroskyabs preserves more information about the proto-language than other dialects that have lower entropies, and is useful for the reconstruction of verbal morphology in the proto-language. As a result, I put an internal reconstruction forward, which helps to understand the evolution of verbal morphology in Khroskyabs and contributes to the field of Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics.

I wrote my final German blog post for this year, this time discussing to which degree we can use our "native speaker intuition" to identify foreign words in our native languages. The blog post, titled "Von Wörtern in fremdem Gewand" can be found here.

Tangut (Chinese: 西夏語 Xīxià Yǔ, "Western Xia language|) is an extinct Sino-Tibetan language attested between 1036-1502 AD, as one of the official languages of the Tangut empire. It is a fascinating language with copious literature and a complex writing system.

Right from the beginning of the 20th century until recently, the exact affiliation of Tangut in the Sino-Tibetan family was unclear, some classified it as with Lolo-Burmese, some claimed that it was related to Qiang. In our earlier study on the phylogeny of Sino-Tibetan (Sagart et al 2019), we used Bayesian phylogeny inference, placing Tangut with Gyalrongic languages. This proposal coincides with the intuition of experts of Gyalrongic. Specifically, Tangut shows a good number of similarities with West Gyalrongic, which includes Khroskyabs and Horpa-Stau languages.

In a paper that was published this week (Lai et al 2020), we explore linguistic evidence that proves Tangut to be a West Gyalrongic language. We find shared lexical, morphological and syntactical innovations between Tangut and modern West Gyalrongic languages, demonstrating from a historical linguistic point of view, that Tangut’s most close relative is indeed West Gyalrongic. We also discuss the migration of the Tanguts based on ancient texts from the 10th century attested Tangut population in today's Western Sichuan, where West Gyalrongic languages are spoken.

The paper can be found here.

A paper by John Miller, Tiago Tresoldi, Roberto Zariquiey, César A. Beltrán Castañón, Natalia Morozova, and myself appeared last week, discussing the use of lexical language models for mono-lingual borrowing detection:

Lexical borrowing, the transfer of words from one language to another, is one of the most frequent processes in language evolution. In order to detect borrowings, linguists make use of various strategies, combining evidence from various sources. Despite the increasing popularity of computational approaches in comparative linguistics, automated approaches to lexical borrowing detection are still in their infancy, disregarding many aspects of the evidence that is routinely considered by human experts. One example for this kind of evidence are phonological and phonotactic clues that are especially useful for the detection of recent borrowings that have not yet been adapted to the structure of their recipient languages. In this study, we test how these clues can be exploited in automated frameworks for borrowing detection. By modeling phonology and phonotactics with the support of Support Vector Machines, Markov models, and recurrent neural networks, we propose a framework for the supervised detection of borrowings in mono-lingual wordlists. Based on a substantially revised dataset in which lexical borrowings have been thoroughly annotated for 41 different languages from different families, featuring a large typological diversity, we use these models to conduct a series of experiments to investigate their performance in mono-lingual borrowing detection. While the general results appear largely unsatisfying at a first glance, further tests show that the performance of our models improves with increasing amounts of attested borrowings and in those cases where most borrowings were introduced by one donor language alone. Our results show that phonological and phonotactic clues derived from monolingual language data alone are often not sufficient to detect borrowings when using them in isolation. Based on our detailed findings, however, we express hope that they could prove to be useful in integrated approaches that take multi-lingual information into account.

The paper can be found here.

I wrote a blog post on "Possibilities of digital communication in linguistics" for our 'How to' series. In the blog post, I’ll illustrate some of the possibilities that linguists and other researchers have to discuss and share their work. You can read it here.

In addtion, my proceedings paper for the COLING2020 workshop on 'Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon' was published. The article with the title "General patterns and language variation: Word frequencies across English, German, and Chinese" is available here.

A lot has happened in November so far.

First, an article has appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, featuring our research on signed languages published earlier this year. The article, titled "Die Stille Revolution" can now be accessed online here.

Second, a paper by John Miller, Tiago Tresoldi, Roberto Zariquiey, César Beltrán, Natalia Morozova, and myself has now been accepted by PLOS One. In this article we test the suitability of several machine learning techniques to infer lexical borrowings in a supervised approach by considering only monolingual information. This article has been available in the form of a preprint already, but it will soon also be available officially.

Third, a new study by Timotheus A. Bodt and myself was accepted for publication in Diachronica. In this study, we test how well one can predict words across languages that have not been elicited during fieldwork, relying on information about potential cognates of the missing words. Our experiment, which turned out to be quite successful, showed that our automated methods provide some good help, although they cannot do all of the work alone. More importantly, however, we realized how useful it can be to carry out active prediction attempts. This study, which went on for more than three years now, is also the first known to me, where predictions about words were preregistered in the form of an experiment. Our accepted authors' version before type setting can now be accessed from Humanities Commons.

On Saturday, I published a new German blog post, devoted to Digital Bullshit Jobs, in which I discuss how ignorance regarding the power of computational solutions leads to a situation in which we lose a lot of time doing manually what could easily be done automatically.

Already on Thursday Volume II of Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice was published with Humanities Commons. This volume presents citable PDF versions of all blog posts that were written in 2019 as part of our CALC blog.

A blog post authored by me was published today on the CALC blog. Following two different requests related to our CLICS project, I have explored different statistics related to which languages colexify which pair of concepts, and which languages have a higher tendency for colexification.

Last week, we published Version 2.4.0 of the Concepticon project, now offering 353 concept lists that are linked to as many as 3825 different concept sets. In this version, we also welcomed two new editors, Carolin Hundt and Tiago Tresoldi, both of whom helped us a lot in improving the Concepticon since its last version.

Yesterday, I published my monthly German blogpost, this time dealing with theories that seem to be useful and powerful but soon turn out to be less helpful, since they tend to attract just-so-stories as explanations. The blog post, titled "Scheinriesentheorien" can be found here.

Today, a new English blogpost appeared, in which I present an updated German wordlist that provides transcribed translations of the concept list proposed by the Intercontinental Dictionary Series. The blogpost can be found here, and the data have been published in the form of a GitHub GIST.

From October 2020 until March 2021, I will act as a part-time deputy professor (Vertretungsprofessor) at the University Bielefeld. Essentially this means that apart from a change in affiliation, I will give an extended lecture on computer-assisted approaches to comparative linguistics at the University Bielefeld (in remote form). I hope that the lecture can this time cover both some basic introductions to Python for linguists as well as an in-depth tutorial on the most recent advancement in computational historical linguistics. As usually, I will share my scripts openly, but I may do that only after the lecture is finished. I am looking forward to this possibility of testing how well our integrative approach to data handling and analysis can be taught to students at the bachelor and master level.

A list of 171 body part concepts was introduced in a blog post today. The list consists of body part concepts from ADAM’S APPLE to WRIST and can be found here.

Today, the final post in my small seris of six blogposts devoted to rhyme networks has appeared. While I have to admit that I was a bit more optimistic when I started the series, I am still content with what has been achieved in the last sixth month, even if most of these achievements reflect the awareness of new problems that need to be solved in the future. The post, titled "Analyzing Rhyme Networks", can be found here.

On Monday, I published a new German blog post, this time dealing with questions of "manual labor in digital times", the post, titled "Handarbeit im digitalen Zeitalter" can be found here.

Yesterday, a new preprint appeared (common work with Hans Geisler and Robert Forkel), featuring "A digital, retro-standardized edition of the Tableaux phonétiques des patois Suisses romands (TPPSR)".

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 Gauchat and his collaborators to turn their data into a dialect atlas could never be realized for the lack of funding, we show how consistent techniques for digitization, accompanied by transparent approaches to retro-standardization can be used to turn the original data of the TPPSR into a modern interactive dialect atlas. The dialect atlas is not only publicly available in the form of a web-based application, but also in the form of a dataset that offers the data in standardized, human- and machine-readable form.

The preprint was archived with Humanities Commons and the web application has been published as a CLLD project.

A new preprint by John E. Miller, myself, Roberto Zariquiey, César A. Beltrán Castañón, Natalia Morozova, and Johann-Mattis List appeared online today (the paper has been submitted). We discuss the identification of borrowings from monolingual wordlists using three different statistical methods.

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 question, phonology and phonotactics. Computationally, phonology and phonotactics can be modeled with support of Markov n-gram models or – as a more recent technique– recurrent neural network models. Based on a substantially revised dataset in which lexical borrowings have been thoroughly annotated for 41 different languages of a large typological diversity, we use these models to conduct a series of experiments to investigate their performance in borrowing detection using only information from monolingual wordlists. Their performance is in many cases unsatisfying, but becomes more promising for strata where there is a significant ratio of borrowings and when most borrowings originate from a dominant donor language. The recurrent neural network performs marginally better overall in both realistic studies and artificial experiments,and holds out the most promise for continued improvement and innovation in lexical borrowing detection. Phonology and phonotactics, as operationalized in our lexical language models, are only a part of the multiple clues speakers use to detect borrowings. While improving our current methods will result in better borrowing detection, what is needed are more integrated approaches that also take into account multilingual and cross-linguistic information for a proper automated borrowing detection.

The preprint has been submitted to Humanities Commons and can be accessed here.

Already last week, my first blog post in our "How to do X in linguistics" series appered, concentrating on How to write an initial review for a journal. Here is the abstract, more can be found in the actual blog post.

Writing reviews for a journal is one of those things which most scientists never actively learn. For laypeople, this may be surprising, given how often the scientific method with its rigorous peer review procedure is being mentioned in the news nowadays. How can it be, one may ask oneself, that this procedure that is usually presented as the core principle of scientific reasoning, is never really actively taught? If the review by experts is the core of the scientific method and what decides about the acceptance of an article, how can it be that scientists do never take a course on article reviewing, and how can it be that reviewers are (as I have previously discussed in a German blogpost) themselves never reviewed or graded?

Today, my fifth (out of six) blogpost in my series From Rhymes to Networks appeared, this time focusing on Constructing Rhyme Networks. While I was first a bit disappointed that I did not find enough time to annotate all of Goethe's Faust until now, I was quite happy to see that I have annotated enough German poems already to allow at least for a small demonstration on how to create rhyme networks from rhyme data on a language different from Chinese.

Today, a new preprint by Abbie Hantgan, Hiba Babiker, and myself appeared online (the study itself is currently under review), discussing preliminary approaches to the detection of contact layers in the language isolate Bangime.

We present a computer-assisted, multidisciplinary, first approach to addressing this problem of detecting the layers of contact in Bangime. First, we assemble lexical evidence of contact between Bangime speakers with their neighboring languages, using a computer-assisted technique, followed by an evaluation of the materials by contrasting them with genetic findings. Specifically, we propose trajectories for Bangande settlement patterns. With this study, we lay the foundation of future collaborative work that will improve, correct, and enhance the results of this study. The original data used for the study are made available so that additional researchers may follow up on and test our hypotheses concerning contact layers in Bangime.

The preprint has been submitted to Humanities Commons and can be accessed here.

Yesterday, I published a new German blog post, which is this time less serious than usual, discussing the tendency of scientists, including myself, to trace topics back to their scientific subjects. The blog post, titled "Wovon man sprechen kann, darüber darf man auch mal schweigen", can be found here.

Time keeps passing, and I have not found the time to keep up with my website, so news come now in condensed form. First, I initiated a new series of blog posts in our Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice blog, which is called How to do X in linguistics? and will features specific topics that are barely taught but considered as one of the basic tasks of a professional linguist and scientist (such as writing a review, responding to a review, or organizing one's bibliography).

Yesterday, another blog post in the series From rhymes to networks appeared, discussing this time the Automated Detection of Rhymes.

We have been working on a feature of the Concepticon that contains data on norms, ratings, and relations for words and concepts. The new database is called NoRaRe and currently offers 71 data sets from studies in psychology and linguistics.

You can take a look at the data in the web app or in the NoRaRe GitHub reporitory.

The preprint can be found here.

Time passes quickly, and there are three new things to announce now. First, I have published a new blog post in German, which deals with the differential treatment in speaking, Andersbehandlung von Menschen im Sprechen.

Second, a preprint titled From Text to Thought: How Analyzing Language Can Advance Psychological Science was just submitted online. The paper by Joshua C. Jackson, Joseph Watts, myself, Ryan Drabble, and Kristen Lindquist discusses how new approaches to language analysis could be fruitfully applied in psychology in the future:

Humans have been using language for thousands of years, but psychologists seldom consider what natural language can tell us about the mind. Here we propose that language offers a unique window into human cognition. After briefly summarizing the legacy of language analyses in psychological science, we show how methodological advances have made these analyses more feasible and insightful than ever before. In particular, we describe how two forms of language analysis—comparative linguistics and natural language processing—are already contributing to how we understand emotion, creativity, and religion, and overcoming methodological obstacles related to statistical power and culturally diverse samples. We summarize resources for learning both of these methods, and highlight the best way to combine language analysis techniques with behavioral paradigms. Applying language analysis to large-scale and cross-cultural datasets promises to provide major breakthroughs in psychological science.

Last not least, we have just launched a call for papers, for a workshop on Model and Evidence in Quantitative Comparative Linguistics, organized by Gerhard Jäger (University Tübingen) and myself as part of the annual meeting of the DGfS in February 2021. The deadline for this Call is 31st of August 2020, and we invite submissions for 20-minute talks and have even limited resources for travel funds available.

Already on Monday this week, a new blogpost on rhyming, part three in my series "From rhymes to networks" appeared. Devoted to rhyme annotation, the post presents some general ideas and a rather simple, but efficient text-based format for the annotation of rhymes in texts. You can find the blogpost here.

I wrote a blogpost describing an on-going project where I have developing a model of phonological distinctive features for computer-assisted language comparison. It explains the rationale behind the proposal and shows how to use a small Python library that allows to access the feature matix without too much boilerplate code. The blogpost can be found on CALC's blog.

A new paper by Johann-Mattis List and myself has been accepted for publication by the SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics. In the article, titled "Developing an annotation framework for word formation processes in comparative linguistics", we propose a new approach to the annotation of cross-linguistic etymological relations that also takes morphological processes into account. Included is a small Python library and annotated data samples from a variety of language families. You can access the preprint here.

Today, a new study in which I discuss the handling of rhyme data and rhyme analysis appeared in Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale.

By reviewing a recent quantitative study of rhyme patterns in Mandarin Chinese, this study shows how data handling and data analysis in the study of rhyme patterns can be improved. Suggestions for improvement include (a) a consistent annotation of rhyme data, which is exhaustive and facilitates data reuse, and (b) emphasizes the importance of automated approaches for exploratory data analysis, which can help to analyze rhyme data in an improved way, prior to applying statistical frameworks for hypothesis testing.

The study itself can be found here, but it can only be viewed with subscription. I have deposited a preprint with Humanities Commons, which you can find here.

Yesterday evening I found time to write a new German blogpost, devoted to the multiple meanings of the word machen in German. This post, which is not meant to be entirely serious, titled Neues zum Wortfeld »machen« is online available here.

I have published a new blog post titled "Why Tag Markup may be Useful for Lexical Data". In this post, I discuss the benefits of using tag-based semantic markup instead of category-based one and propose a relatively simple way to create a tag markup by aggregating the existing categorisations provided in the data. You can find the post here.

Two more studies have recently appeared. The first is study on Chinese character formation graphs, together with Nathan W. Hill:

This paper proposes the use of network techniques in the exploration of Old Chinese phonology as reflected in the phonophoric determinatives of xiéshēng 諧聲 characters. We use the approach to examine five specific proposals in Chinese historical phonology, and whether the distinctions suggested by these proposals can be said to be recoverable on the basis of phonophoric choice. The major finding is that the type A versus type B distinction is in some cases encoded in the choice of phonophoric determinative, while other distinctions are only spuriously if at all reflected in the phonophoric subseries.

The paper is available in Open Access and can be found here.

The second study is a popular science article about the experiments on prediction in historical linguistics, which Tim Bodt and me have started some two years ago. The article is available (but only for subscribers) in the journal Babel: The Language Magazin, but you can find our authors' copy here.

Yesterday, the second blogpost out of a series of six blogposts devoted to the construction of rhyme networks planned for the next months appeared. It discusses rhyming in general and can be found here.

Last week, we published a new paper "Computer-Assisted Language Comparison: State of the Art" in the Journal of Open Humanities Data. In this paper, we demonstrate our current five-stage workflow for computer-assisted language comparison which lifts raw data to a level where sound correspondence patterns across multiple languages have been identified and can be readily presented, inspected, and discussed. The paper can be found here, the code can be found in the GitHub repository lingpy/workflow-paper. To see the real-time executation of the workflow, please visit our Code Ocean capsule.

A paper by Robert Forkel and myself, introducing "CLDFBench. Give your Cross-Linguistic data a lift" has just appeared officially as part of the (now only digital) LREC conference. Here is the abstract:

While the amount of cross-linguistic data is constantly increasing, most datasets produced today and in the past cannot be considered FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reproducible). To remedy this and to increase the comparability of cross-linguistic resources, it is not enough to set up standards and best practices for data to be collected in the future. We also need consistent workflows for the “retro-standardization” of data that has been published during the past decades and centuries. With the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats initiative, first standards for cross-linguistic data have been presented and successfully tested. So far, however, CLDF creation was hampered by the fact that it required a considerable degree of computational proficiency. With cldfbench, we introduce a framework for the retro-standardization of legacy data and the curation of new datasets that drastically simplifies the creation of CLDF by providing a consistent, reproducible workflow that rigorously supports version control and long term archiving of research data and code. The framework is distributed in form of a Python package along with usage information and examples for best practice. This study introduces the new framework and illustrates how it can be applied by showing how a resource containing structural and lexical data for Sinitic languages can be efficiently retro-standardized and analyzed.

The paper can be found here, and the code itself is hosted with GitHub at cldf/cldfbench.

In the June issue of Psychologie Heute, which was available from Wednesday on, there is a report on the work on on emotion concepts (Jackson et al. 2019) with help of our database of cross-linguistic colexifications (Rzymski et al. 2020). The article can also be found online, but it is not freely available without subscription.

During last week, I found time to prepare two more blog posts for May, one German post concentrating on scientific practice and some general ideas on open research within the humanities, titled "Was Wissen schafft, wird festgestellt: Gedanken zur offenen Forschung", and online available here. A second blog post was devoted to an exploration of semantic similarity as it is represented and handled in the STARLING software package. This post, which can be found here, is accompanied by a Python software package called pysen, and an interactive online application which you can find here.

I have published a new blog post with the title "New Lexical Data for the Kusunda Language" on Monday this week. In this post, I mention the challenges of collecting second-hand Kusunda lexical data and present a new Kusunda dataset which is available in CLDF format online. You can find the post here.

I have published a new German blog post during the last weekend, titled "Was sich reimt, das frisst sich". In this post, I discuss the chances and challenges involved in the systematic annotation of rhymed poetry across languages, genres, and times. You can find the post here.

This week, an article by Johann-Mattis List, Timotheus A. Bodt, Nathan W. Hill, Nathanael E. Schweikhard, and myself was accepted by the Journal of Open Humanities Data. In the article, we present a workflow which lifts raw data to a stage where algorithms for computer-assisted language comparison can detect sound correspondence patterns across several languages. At every stage, the data can be interactively inspected and even be modified, which makes this workflow truly computer-assisted. We also provide a tutorial, in which we show how to run the code and how to inspect or edit the data at all stages. The authors copy, which we submitted to Humanities Commons, can be accessed here.

This week, Mattis List and me submitted a paper in which we present a framework for the annotation of etymological relationships in a human- and machine-readable fashion. The preprint can be accessed here.

Two new blogposts have appeared in this week, completing the typical series of blog posts for March. The first post is an English version of my German post published earlier this month, dealing with the evolution of personal names. Titled "Evolution unchained: The development of person names and the limits of sequences" here.

The second post presents a new rhyme annotation tool, called RhyAnT, which I managed to prepare in a first draft version. This post, published with our blog on Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice can be found here.

The rhyme annotation tool itself is still in flux, although a first draft version is already available at https://digling.org/calc/rhyant/. I hope to finish a stable version soon, so we can start on working towards a cross-linguistic database of rhymed poetry.

A new paper by Nathaniel Sims, Robert Forkel and myself has been accepted for publication. The study, titled "Towards a sustainable handling of interlinear-glossed text in language documentation" presents a computer-assisted approach to study interlinear-glossed text within the computational frameworks set up along with the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats initiative. Our authors' version can be found here.

Additionally, I wrote a new German blogpost, this time dealing with the evolution of personal names. This post, titled "Evolution unchained: Die Entwicklung von Personennamen und die Grenzen der Sequenzen", can be found here.

A new paper by myself was published lsat month. It introduced the DAFSA project, a Python library for generating graphs over collections of sequences that highlight recurring and redundant information. I have been using it to experiment with morphological detection in low-resource languages. The paper is available here.

A new paper by Robert Forkel and myself has been accepted for publication. The study presents the CLDFbench package and illustrates how it can be used in order to convert datasets conveniently into the CLDF format. While the paper will only appear in May, we have uploaded our authors' copy in form of a preprint with the Humanities Commons repository, where you can find it under this link.

Additionally, I managed to release a new version of EvoBib, Version 1.1, which now contains about 100 bibliographic entries more than the previous version and also about 300 more quotes (mostly abstracts).

Two more blogposts appeared in this week, and one more paper was accepted and is available in form of its author version. First, Justin Power, Guido Grimm, and myself wrote a summary responding to critics on our paper on sign language evolution, which is titled "How should one study language evolution" and can be found here. Second, I wrote a short blog post showing how the data of our CLICS studies can be converted to a concept list for our Concepticon project, which you can find here. Third, a paper in which I discuss how one can improve data handling and analysis when studying rhyme patterns, was accepted for publication in the Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale. The paper, titled "Improving data handling and analysis in the study of rhyme patterns" is now also available in form of the authors copy, submitted to Humanities Commons.

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.