Lydia Steiner Bioinformatics Group, Interdisciplinary Center for Bioinformatics, University of Leipzig ∗ Peter F. Stadler Bioinformatics Group, University of Leipzig, Interdisciplinary Center for Bioinformatics, University of Leipzig; Max-Planck-Institute for Mathematics in the Science; Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology; Center for non-coding RNA in Technology and Health, Uni...

This is the second of two articles that survey and assess progress and prospects in the historical linguistics of the Otomanguean language family, which is the most widely distributed and most diverse linguistic lineage of Mesoamerica. While considerable progress has been made in understanding the linguistic and cultural history of Otomanguean, in some ways it remains the Mesoamerican language ...

Historical linguistics studies the relationships between languages as they change over time. Occasionally, speakers of a language will split into separate groups for any number of reasons and become isolated from each other. When this happens, the language they shared begins to diverge. These divergences are typically phonological, syntactic, and semantic in nature. These changes in each child ...

a place-name or a toponym is a word used to indicate, denote or identify a geographic locality. place-names are formed in the course of history of a region and are affected by various linguistic, social, political and cultural events. toponymy is the taxonomic study of place-names, based on etymological, historical and geographical information. this paper first defines toponym and topnymy and i...

This paper addresses several topics with reference to Philippine hunter-gatherer groups that are relevant to an understanding of their relationships with non-hunter-gatherer groups and their significance for historical linguistics. Section 1 first provides a discussion of the demographic ranges of the extant Negrito groups. In section 2, different views as to the time depth of the prehistoric r...

There is a rich history, dating back, according to Heine (2003), at least to observations in the 18th century by Condillac (1746) and Horne Tooke (1857) (first published 1786), if not earlier, associated with the study of the phenomenon of grammaticalization, i.e. how grammatical elements arise out of less (or non-) grammatical elements. 1 Still, only in the past twenty-five or so years has it ...

Mayan historical linguistic research has progressed at a healthy pace since the 1970s. The recent decipherment of ancient Maya hieroglyphic writing and the publication, in the last decade, of a large cohort of high quality linguistic descriptions of several Mayan languages, many of them written by native speakers of those languages, have opened a floodgate of new linguistic data that promises t...

ed 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... The information in Table 2 can be used to measure similarity between adjacent periods: Each period is represented not by a single frequency value but in fact by a vector of frequency values for the past participles; relative similarity between adjacent periods can be computed with a statistic such as Pearson's correlation r. The first step of VNC...