Center for the Human Past
language tree
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UU researcher profile: Harald Hammarström documents languages on the verge of extinction
Read more →: UU researcher profile: Harald Hammarström documents languages on the verge of extinctionA professor of linguistics with a Master’s in computer science and a PhD in computational linguistics, Harald goes an extra mile to document the languages that head towards extinction. “Throughout time, smaller languages have always been swallowed up by larger ones. But now, with globalisation, this is happening at an incredibly accelerated pace.” Language has…
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Talks of the Past open seminar: From Phonology to Phylogeny: Inferring Language Trees from Cognate Word Forms
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Read more →: Talks of the Past open seminar: From Phonology to Phylogeny: Inferring Language Trees from Cognate Word FormsAbstract 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.…