• Mini-Seminar: Models, data, and their limits: What can we know about the deep history of language families? with Philipp Rönchen

    Villa Lugnet von Kraemers allé 8, Uppsala, Sweden, Sweden

    Abstract Computational methods are increasingly used to reconstruct the deep history of language families, yet different models often produce strikingly different answers. This reflects a general challenge in the historical sciences: we must draw conclusions from fragmentary data shaped by complex processes that cannot be directly observed or experimentally repeated. In this talk, I summarise […]

  • Talks of the Past open seminar: From Phonology to Phylogeny: Inferring Language Trees from Cognate Word Forms

    Blåsenhus, seminar room 12:010 (ground floor) von Kraemers allé 1, Uppsala, Sweden

    Abstract Linguistic phylogenies are commonly inferred from abstract cognate classifications that encode relationships among lexemes. Although widespread, this practice has well-recognised limitations: it discards phylogenetic signal contained in segmental word forms, restricts the range of evolutionary questions that can be addressed, and treats cognacy judgments, which are hypotheses in their own right, as observed data. […]