Database update 🌐 We launched a new version of CLICS 🚀 - the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications
clics.clld.org

The paper introducing the new version is available here: aclanthology.org/2025.iwcs-ma...

Geez what a haul! 😍

You have a year to prepare, Arne—you wouldn’t want to disappoint the good people of Bluesky would you!?

Discussions on Legacy Materials is here to teach our community to imagine a world where conferences are robustly chandelierer. Grab your befuddling archival language data and join us next April (in Passau!), everybody!

Discussion on Legacy Materials 3
Group pic

#DiLegMa3

This is @arne.rubehn.com !

@samueljbeer.bsky.social showed us the problems that even a single 107-word wordlist can bring , how to contextualize it, and how to recontextualize it. It’s worth it to halt and break your head for a while over a small detail like a punctuation mark.

#dilegma3

A woman delivers a lecture in a fancy room. Endless boxes and reel-to-reel tapes are depicted on a screen.

Elsie Marie T. Or “Legacy Materials in the Ernesto Constantino Collection”: an introduction to ta massive collection of legacy materials last held by Ernesto Constantino, one of the pillars of linguistics in the Philippines. It’s a massive undertaking in need of humanpower and resources! #DiLegMa3

A man in front of a window gestures at a screen while delivering a presentation.

Arne Rubehn”Digital Scholarly Editions of Austronesian Legacy Materials”. Rubehn presents a model for producing interoperable wordlists from legacy hard copy format to a standardized format, including records of all representational choices. #DiLegMa3

A man in front of a window gestures at a screen while delivering a presentation.

Arne Rubehn”Digital Scholarly Editions of Austronesian Legacy Materials”. Rubehn presents a model for producing interoperable wordlists from legacy hard copy format to a standardized format, including records of all representational choices. #DiLegMa3

A woman gives an academic talk while standing in front of a window.

Shobhana Chelliah “Creating Access to Edward Hillard’s Mizo materials through keywords from a controlled vocabulary.” Chelliah works with CoRSAL, an archive of South Asian/adjacent languages. It’s a struggle to create a controlled vocabulary with sufficient but not excessive granularity! #DiLegMa3

A man delivers a presentation in front of a fancy window.

Peter K. Austin “planting linguistic legacy materials: some cross-disciplinary possibilities” in the mid-19th century, Ferdinand von Mueller solicited and curated a massive collection of plant specimens gathered by amateur naturalists. #DiLegMa3 (1/3)

Biographical research on one amateur contributor led them to an 1867 newspaper travelogue about an encounter between the contributor and Yuwaalaraay people—a record of Yuwaalaraay culture predating academic publications by a decade! #DiLegMa3 (3/3)

The database of the resulting herbarium includes lots of supplemental information about the specimens, including many indigenous plant names. It’s a closed catalog, but Austin has been able to collaborate with a team to produce a botanically sophisticated plant name database. #DiLegMa3 (2/3)

A man delivers a presentation in front of a fancy window.

Peter K. Austin “planting linguistic legacy materials: some cross-disciplinary possibilities” in the mid-19th century, Ferdinand von Mueller solicited and curated a massive collection of plant specimens gathered by amateur naturalists. #DiLegMa3 (1/3)

Shobhana Chelliah and Søren Borch present for coauthors Jose Benavides and Mary Burke Borch points at a screen while Chelliah manages the computer.

Chelliah and Borch (see alt) “Challenges and network building in the creation and use of the Akha legacy collection”. Inga-Lill Hanson is a Swedish anthropologist who collected loads of recordings and notes from Akha in Southeast Asia. #DiLegMa3 (1/4)

“You cannot wait until you’re 75 to get these things out of your head” (Shobhana Chelliah on how valuable it is for senior scholars to assist in fleshing out glosses and metadata that largely exist in the head of the researcher. We need young scholars to work on this too! #DiLegMa3 (4/4)

The obstacles can’t be overcome by just a person or two! The team has relied on recruiting a network of people, many of whose commitments to the materials are social rather than professional. As a matter of personal horntooting, Beer (2021) theorizes this a bit in an African context. #DiLegMa3 (3/4)

The team has encountered loads of the typical challenges preparing the materials for reuse (idiosyncratic transcriptions, obsolete file types, inadequate glossing, etc.) #DiLegMa3 (2/4)

Shobhana Chelliah and Søren Borch present for coauthors Jose Benavides and Mary Burke Borch points at a screen while Chelliah manages the computer.

Chelliah and Borch (see alt) “Challenges and network building in the creation and use of the Akha legacy collection”. Inga-Lill Hanson is a Swedish anthropologist who collected loads of recordings and notes from Akha in Southeast Asia. #DiLegMa3 (1/4)

A man gestures at a screen while giving a talk.

Luca Ciucci: “A morphological analysis of 19th century Zamucoan varieties.” Zamucoan is a small language family spoken on the border of Paraguay and Bolivia. Two languages persist today, but there are 18th century Jesuit-produced records of a third Zamucoan language. #DiLegMa3 (1/3)

The morphological analyses of 18th century sources provide motivation for reconsidering existing reconstruction schema for the Zamucoan languages—a variety once thought to be a descendent of the attested 18th century must better be thought of as a sister language. #DiLegMa3 (4/4)

One trend that emerges is that data inconsistently occurs in argument (free) form or in predicative form. So for example, if the historical researchers asked how to say dog (by pointing at a dog?), they would alternately be told “dog” or “it is a dog”. #DiLegMa3 (3/4)

Additionally, there are ~250 item wordlists from the mid 19th century for a variety of Zamucoan lects. These have been analyzed comparatively, but not morphological. Ciucci provides a morphological analysis informed by contemporary Zamucoan descriptions. #DiLegMa3 (2/3)

A man gestures at a screen while giving a talk.

Luca Ciucci: “A morphological analysis of 19th century Zamucoan varieties.” Zamucoan is a small language family spoken on the border of Paraguay and Bolivia. Two languages persist today, but there are 18th century Jesuit-produced records of a third Zamucoan language. #DiLegMa3 (1/3)

A woman gestures at a screen while giving a talk in a room with big fancy windows.

Joanna Dolinska: “Dagur language - the history of documentation of the easternmost Mongolic language”. Dagur lacks a standard orthography, but has variously been represented with Manchu, Cyrillic, and Latin scripts #DiLegMa3 (1/2)

Dolinska describes a database she has assembled that brings together these disparate sources, enriched with consistent metadata and grammatical annotation. #DiLegMa3 (2/2)

A woman gestures at a screen while giving a talk in a room with big fancy windows.

Joanna Dolinska: “Dagur language - the history of documentation of the easternmost Mongolic language”. Dagur lacks a standard orthography, but has variously been represented with Manchu, Cyrillic, and Latin scripts #DiLegMa3 (1/2)

A man gestures enthusiastic toy while giving an academic talk in front of fancy windows.

J Drew Hancock: “Legacy Materials and the Reconstruction of Cáhniks”. Oral history, archaeology, and existing historical linguistic publications give different accounts of Cáhniks (Caddoan) origins. #DiLegMa3 (1/3)

This leads Hancock to posit that Skiri Pawnee, South Band Pawnee, and Arikara should be treated as dispersing simultaneously, with Skiri and South Band’s evident similarity resultant from contact in the historical era. #DiLegMa3 (3/3)