I cannot remember when I decided to become a linguist. I cannot even remember when I first called myself a linguist (as opposed to a student, a Sinologist, or a scientist). But I can remember when I wrote my first review for a linguistics journal, and I also remember that…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
In times where home office is an obligation rather than an option, I have finally found time to create a first draft version of a web-based tool for interactive rhyme annotation. The tool is written in plain JavaScript, without any additional libraries, and supports the inline rhyme annotation format which…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
The CLICS database in its current format makes direct use of the data assembled by the Concepticon project in order to aggregate lexical data from different sources. At the same time, the CLICS database itself can be seen as an interesting conceptlist, providing information on concept polysemy and semantic similarity.…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
While the core of the Concepticon project (https://concepticon.clld.org, List et al. 2019) are the numerous conceptlists which are constantly being added by the growing list of contributors, we have already from the beginning of the project, with the first version (List et al. 2016) tried to collect various kinds of…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
Having seen how we can obtain a simple scorer derived from the feature system in CLTS (List et al. 2019) in last month’s post, what is missing now, in order to use the scorer for alignment analyses, is an alignment function which can take the scorer as an argument. If…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
In the past, people have repeatedly asked me how they could use their own scoring functions in combination with LingPy’s alignment algorithms. Their major concern was that the sound-class-based scoring systems we use in LingPy might fail to reflect true phonetic similarity of sounds, specifically also because they are not…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
During the 24th International Conference of Historical Linguistics, I was asked by a colleague whether I would know a good way to align and scores sentences available in form of phonetic transcriptions. While it is clear that one can roughly compare the difference between sequences rather easily by aligning them,…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
One of the major efforts behind our recently published paper on the origin and spread of the Sino-Tibetan languages (Sagart et al. 2019) was the creation of a database of lexical cognates which was used to run the phylogenetic analyses. The creation of this database started about four years ago,…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
Having illustrated how a quick correspondence pattern analysis can be done with help of readily formatted data and the EDICTOR tool alone, it is now time to show how we can use the LingRex package in order to carry out a full-fledged correspondence pattern analysis. While EDICTOR uses a simple…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
Following up on my announcement to present in more detail how the algorithms for automatic correspondence pattern detection can be applied, this post introduces the preliminary preparations needed to run a first experiment with aligned data. In order to avoid that we have to align a dataset completely from scratch,…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
Imagine you have two different datasets, both containing approximately the same concepts, but slightly different numbers of columns and — more importantly — potentially identical identifiers in the first column. A bad idea for merging these datasets would be to paste them in Excel or some other kind of spreadsheet…
