Formal notations for the handling of sound laws in historical linguistics have been employed by linguists for a long time. So far, however, linguists have barely tried to describe their notation practices formally. As a result, a lot of variation can be found in the practice of sound law notation.…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
This study gives a brief overview on formal aspects of etymological analysis, by providing a modified workflow for the classical comparative method in historical language comparison. This workflow is contrasted with the current state-of-the-art in computational historical linguistics, pointing out where computational methods and interactive tools for annotation are lacking,…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
In this opinion piece, I share my view on the application of language models and text generation services in scientific research. In my opinion, scientific research that lives up to the promises of open science must provide full documentation of all prompts and exchanges that were used to create a…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
Multilingual lexical data is typically stored in a wide variety of forms, based on many idiosyncratic decisions that vary from dataset to dataset. Here, a simple but efficient solution for the manipulation of lexical data in multilingual wordlists will be introduced. This solution, the PyLexibank FormSpec, was originall developed for…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
This study introduces a collection of templates that can be used to contribute data to the Database of Norms, Ratings, and Relations (NoRaRe) of words and concepts. The templates are intended to facilitate the process of dataset conversion and serve as a starting point for those who are interested to…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
Many languages make use of transparent compounding processes in order to express certain words in their lexicon. With time, these processes can loose their transparency, making them hard to detect automatically. With large data collections simple tests can be designed to detect transparent compounds and investigate their distribution. This study…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
Computational approaches in historical linguistics have made great progress during the past two decades. As of now, it is much more common to propose subgroupings based on phylogenetic analyses than on traditional considerations using shared innovations. We have also seen a drastic increase in openly available datasets that share cognate…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
Computational approaches in historical linguistics have made great progress during the past two decades. As of now, it is much more common to propose subgroupings based on phylogenetic analyses than on traditional considerations using shared innovations. We have also seen a drastic increase in openly available datasets that share cognate…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
Most linguists have to type special characters that are not available on an ordinary keyboard on a regular basis. Reflecting about the general problems involved in typing special characters, I review different solutions and argue that linguists should not only be able to type special characters on their computers, but…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
In this study, we illustrate how standardized phonetic transcriptions can be added to the data for Panoan and Tacanan languages provided by the Intercontinental Dictionary Series. The result is presented as a new dataset that keeps reference to the original data and adds phonetic transcriptions for each word form in…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
The Python package linse (https://pypi.org/project/linse) offers various methods for the manipulation and annotation of sequences. In this short overview, we summarize its major functionalities and provide some information on its background and how we intend to develop it further in the future. 1 Introduction Many tasks that need to be…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
Our blog “Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice” goes into its seventh year. We reflect on the role the blog played in the past and present and new goals and concrete ideas for the future. The most drastic innovation we initiated is to turn the blog into an open journal, which…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
The Cross-Linguistic Transcription Systems (CLTS, https://clts.clld.org) project serves as a reference catalogue for speech sounds. At the core of the project is a generative method that parses existing IPA transcriptions (or transcriptions in other supported transcription systems) and checks if they conform to the principles and components laid out in…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
Orthography profiles allow for the explicit simultaneous segmentation and conversion of sequences from one orthography to another. They play a crucial role in the standardization workflows developed as part of the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats initiative, where they are used to convert original orthographies used for language documentation to a strict…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
The Dogon and Bangime Linguistics project (https://dogonlanguages.org) offers a large comparative spreadsheet in which translational equivalents for a huge number of concepts are translated into various Dogon languages. Due to its enormous size, no attempts have been made so far to integrate the spreadsheet with the lexical resources that were…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
Recently, I was asked by a colleague how one could query only those datasets in the Lexibank repository which come with cognate sets annotated by humans. While I first thought this could be done in a very straightforward way, I figeured out, when trying it myself, that the code still…
