This paper responds to the great interest to humanities researchers who are concerned with the study of the Romanian language in its diachronic evolution: developing a set of tools allowing (semi-)automatic interpretative transcription of scanned Romanian documents written in Cyrillic, in print as well as manuscript forms. The corpus contains old data, belonging to the 19th20th centuries, in or...

Lexicostatistics has been applied in linguistics to inform phylogenetic relations among languages. There are two important yet not well-studied parameters in this approach: the conventional size of vocabulary list to collect potentially true cognates and the minimum matching instances required to confirm a recurrent sound correspondence. Here, we derive two statistical principles from stochasti...

As the patronymic Ethiopian names do not match widespread GIVEN NAME – FAMILY pattern of Western world, authors are often quoted inconsistently and inappropriately by scholars in field linguistic typology historical-comparative linguistics. After a brief introduction into naming conventions summary recurrent issues quoting scientific publications, we propose number general citation rules that w...

Historical linguistics aims at inferring the most likely language phylogenetic tree starting from information concerning the evolutionary relatedness of languages. The available information are typically lists of homologous (lexical, phonological, syntactic) features or characters for many different languages: a set of parallel corpora whose compilation represents a paramount achievement in lin...

Abstract Subgrouping language varieties within dialect continua poses challenges for the application of comparative method historical linguistics, and similar claims have been made use Bayesian phylogenetic methods. In this article, we present first analysis Mixtecan family southern Mexico show that produces valuable results new insights with respect to subgrouping beyond what geography provide...

introduction        a dialect is a variety of a language used by group of people whose lexicon, syntax, phonetics and phonology are different from those of other people. the existence of many geographical, economic and social barriers among the speakers of a language cause the emergence of many dialects. as such, each language has many dialects and accents and each dialect has many different ac...

MultiTree is an NFS-funded project collecting scholarly hypotheses about language relationships, and visualizing them on a web site in the form of trees or graphs. Two open online interfaces allow scholars, students, and the general public an easy access to search for language information or comparisons of competing hypotheses. One objective of the project was to facilitate research in historic...

This paper discusses the post-enlightenment development of philology in Europe during the 19-20 centuries, particularly in the German speaking areas. After several centuries of sustained interest in the Graeco-Roman Classics, all types of medieval, older European and Asian literatures became the focus of new textual approaches. Prominent was an historical and critical approach bolstered by the ...

Perhaps more than any linguist in the 20 century, and now into the 21, whether a generativist or a specialist in historical linguistics, Raimo Anttila, the honorand – and deservedly so – of this volume, has brought to the forefront of linguistic thinking and theorizing the phenomenon of analogy, understood here (following Raimo) in a broad sense to refer to any change in a given form due to the...