I'm hiring! 2 x postdocs in Cognitive Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics, to work on the cultural history of Australia and Papua. More details in link below, and please do repost or share elsewhere!
www.isle.uzh.ch/en/jobs/post...

'Ah but you're cherry-picking excellent writers. Surely the average person benefits? I myself found it useful this one time'

No. None of us benefit from dragging down the level of writing to some lowest common denominator. Have some self-respect. Be ambitious. ideophone.org/find-your-ow...

🤣

Screenshot of an email that reads: Invitation to review "Research on a High-Reliability-GuidedHierarchical Dynamic Optimal Scheduling Methodfor Photovoltaic Systems" Should you accept to review this manuscript, your report would be due within 10 days. Dear Dr List, We have received a manuscript for Scientific Reports that we think falls within your area of expertise. Our reviewers are integral to ensuring we have the highest-quality publication. We would greatly appreciate it if you could let us know if you are available to review by accepting or declining the invitation link below.

Yes, #ScientificReports, with my background as a linguist interested in the evolution of languages, I will of course gladly review your paper on photovoltaic systems in 10 days, expect it in 5 🫡

Un nouveau cognat rgyalrong-kiranti : l’étymon pour la “trace” Comme nous l’avions montré dans Jacques et Pellard (2021), les cognats partagés entre les groupes kiranti et rgyalronguiques sont très peu nombreux, et tous partagés par d’autres branches de la famill...

Un nouveau cognat partagé exclusivement par le rgyalronguique et le kiranti:
panchr.hypotheses.org/3993

Family Tree Model The family tree remains the main metaphor for describing the evolutionary history and relationships of languages. Languages, like biological species, evolve following processes such as descent with m...

Our chapter on the tree model (with @thomaspellard.bsky.social and @robinryder.bsky.social ) is at last published online: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Foundations of Formal Etymological Analysis 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 ...

The March contribution to our CALCiP journal / blog is the possible start of a more detailed series on "Foundations of Formal Etymological Analysis"

calc.hypotheses.org/9208

doi.org/10.15475/cal...

Vom Konsumieren von Information Ich konsumiere Informationen in der Form von Zeitungsartikeln meist genauso routiniert und auch schnell, wie ich mit Fastfoodgerichten umgehe: ich ziehe sie mir rein. Wenn man sich etwas reinzieht, da...

Mein Blogbeitrag im März via @dehypotheses.bsky.social handelt vom "Vom Konsumieren von Information" wub.hypotheses.org/3386

13th Summer School of Chinese Lx, July 27-31 2026 @ U. Stuttgart, offering courses on "The Syntax-Semantics Interface of Modern Mandarin", "The diachronic development of the TAM system of Chinese", "The Syntax of Cantonese" and "Sinitic Languages of the Pearl River Region".

Praktische Einführung in das wissenschaftliche Arbeiten Bei dem Textdokument handelt es sich um das Skript zu einer Vorlesung, die zum ersten Mal in dieser Form im Wintersemester 2025/2026 an der Universität Passau gehalten wurde und versucht, eine möglich...

Ich habe gerade das Skript zu meiner Vorlesung "Praktische Einführung in das wissenschaftliche Arbeiten" im Wintersemester 2025/2026 über Humanities Commons online gestellt, so dass es als Open Educational Resource frei zur Verfügung steht.

doi.org/10.17613/b1b...

Sprachmodelle und Sprachverarbeitung Bei dem Textdokument handelt es sich um das Skript zu einer Vorlesung, die zum ersten Mal in dieser Form im Wintersemester 2025/2026 an der Universität Passau gehalten wurde und versucht, eine möglich...

Ich habe gerade das Skript zu meiner Vorlesung "Sprachmodelle und Sprachverarbeitung" im Wintersemester 2025/2026 über Humanities Commons online gestellt, so dass es als Open Educational Resource frei zur Verfügung steht.

doi.org/10.17613/mxv...

New contribution to our Blog / Journal on Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice, this time by our doctoral student David Snee and myself:

Computing Detailed Colexifications with Missing Data Information from the CLICS⁴ Collection

doi.org/10.15475/cal...

calc.hypotheses.org/9164

I just released EvoBib 1.11, my quote and reference collection that offers a bibliography for historical linguistics, linguistic typology, and beyond.

Browse online at: evobib.digling.org

Get data at: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

They surely know how super capable I am 🦾😏🤳

@SciRep, you really know how to engage with your scientists, asking me out three times in a week ☺️

Vom Winden vor Winden Mit viel linguistischem Interesse habe ich vor kurzem einen populärwissenschaftlichen Artikel von Schubert (2026) gelesen, der von einer Forschungsgruppe handelt, der es gelungen war, die täglichen Bl...

Mein Blogbeitrag im Februar via @dehypotheses.bsky.social beschäftigt sich mit der Etymologie von Tabuwörtern, die häufig lautmalerisch motiviert sein können.

"Vom Winden vor Winden"

wub.hypotheses.org/3348

Wow, they really seem to want particularly *me* to review this study. I must be very important to them.

Hm, should I review this super exiting study from Scientific Reports? Or should I leave it to others?

From Psycholinguistics to Computer Vision. A Comprehensive Review of Object Naming Data and Studies In recent years, much research has focused on what happens in the human brain when a perceptual stimulus, such as a picture, is converted into linguistic content, a word. This process is commonly ref...

A review article on the interesting technique of Object Naming by our doctoral student Alžběta Kučerová (and to a small degree myself) just appeared in Language and Linguistics Compass.

doi.org/10.1111/lnc3...

Infomap by Rosvall and Bergstrom (2008) is so central to my work, I use it in research a lot, but also in teaching, this is such a beautiful algorithm with such a robust and nice implementation!

Database of Norms, Ratings, and Relations (NoRaRe), by @annikatjuka.bsky.social et al., is a meta database of linguistic databases dealing with words and concepts, see norare.clld.org for details.

Using Correspondence Patterns to Identify Irregular Words in Cognate sets Through Leave-One-Out Validation Regular sound correspondences constitute the principal evidence in historical language comparison. Despite the heuristic focus on regularity, it is often more an intuitive judgement than a quantified ...

New preprint by Frederic Blum (major idea and implementation) and me (the one who criticized and commented), introducing a new approach on regularity assessment.

"Using correspondence patterns to identify irregular words in cognate sets through leave-one-out-validation"

arxiv.org/abs/2602.02221

Transparent Application of Text Generation Tools in Scientific Research 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 op...

First contribution in this year to our blog / journal on Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice.

"Transparent Application of Text Generation Tools in Scientific Research"

calc.hypotheses.org/9138

In the past decade or two, predatory publishers have built a parallel universe of publication opportunities preying on the least privileged & most vulnerable of our colleagues

I got my hands on what passes for peer review at one such journal
ideophone.org/on-plagiaris...

Mein erster Blogbeitrag im neuen Jahr beschäftigt sich kritisch mit dem Begriff des Halluzinierens von Sprachmodellen: "Vom Fabulieren und Halluzinieren" wub.hypotheses.org/3313

WTF?! 🫣 Is this a joke?
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A religious quote, "primitive languages", and nonsense everywhere. Is Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications a scam journal?

Unstable Grounds for Beautiful Trees? Testing the Robustness of Concept Translations in the Compilation of Multilingual Wordlists David Snee, Luca Ciucci, Arne Rubehn, Kellen Parker Van Dam, Johann-Mattis List. Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP. 2025.

Quantifying it was harder than we hoped for. What I find telling is that differences across datasets for the same languages amounts to more than 10% on Ø, both in this new study and a previous one, in which we only explored how much difference one can find out there: aclanthology.org/2025.sigtyp-...

Variation in Language Phylogenies May Result From Variation in Concept Translation Phylogenetic reconstruction in historical linguistics now typically relies on cognates sets assembled from multilingual wordlists. While more and more scholars now trust in the robustness of the algor...

Final preprint in this year (I guess), by our doctoral student David Snee, Luca Ciucci, and myself:

Variation in Language Phylogenies May Result From Variation in Concept Translation

doi.org/10.17613/dpa...

Kann man verantwortungsvolle Wissenschaft mit KI betreiben? Wir blicken auf ungefähr drei Jahre zurück, in denen der Hype um Chatbots und die sogenannte “künstliche Intelligenz” angehalten hat, ohne einen sichtbaren Schaden zu nehmen. In dieser Zeit habe ich erlebt, wie die Anzahl von Menschen, die regelmäßig mit Chatbots über ihre Arbeit sprechen, in meinem Kollegenkreis beständig zugenommen hat. Es gibt einige Poweruser, […]

"Da Chatbots weder Urheberschaft noch Transparenz kennen, haben sie die zwei grundlegenden Säulen umgeworfen, die unsere Wissenschaft bisher getragen haben."

@lingulist.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy argumentiert, dass gute wissenschaftliche Praxis und KI sich widersprechen.

Towards a Unified Conversion Table for Semitic Transcriptions and Transliterations In this study we present a preliminary conversion table that can be used for transcriptions and transliterations across different Semitic languages. We introduce the basic idea behind the table, show ...

Final blog post in our CALC-Journal in this year.

"Towards a Unified ConversionTable for Semitic Transcriptionsand Transliterations"

With our new project member Carlo Meloni.

calc.hypotheses.org/9109