How To Visualize Language Polygons with QGIS (How to Do X in Linguistics 15)

This tutorial shows how to build beautiful maps using polygon data of language distributions and the geospatial software QGIS. For this purpose, I show in the first part how to extract a list of Glottocodes from CLDF datasets and how to use command-line tools to extract the polygon data from Glottography datasets. The second part focuses on the visualization of the extracted data with QGIS. In this part, I also show to include non-linguistic data like archaeological sites and how to prepare the map for printing. The tutorial is fully implemented with free and open software and intends to make map-making accessible for linguists and other researchers.

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CLICS⁴ as CLLD Web Application

The fourth version of the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (https://clics.clld.org) was published last year. Now, we launched the accompanying web application that presents the data for interactive inspection and exploration. The study presents the application in brief and discusses also the development of cross-linguistic colexification databases in the future.

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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 contrasted with the current state-of-the-art in computational historical linguistics, pointing out where computational methods and interactive tools for annotation are lacking, and where they are available already.

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Computing Detailed Colexifications with Missing Data Information from the CLICS⁴ Collection

CLICS⁴ offers a refined structural representation of cross-linguistic colexification patterns but retains an implicit representation of missing data. This obscures whether the lack of a colexification in a language for paired concepts is due to its true absence in the language, or due to missing data on the concept or word form level. We introduce a straightforward workflow that can be applied to individual datasets from CLICS⁴ to identify cases of colexification via a three-way attestation scheme. Our approach captures the presence or absence of a colexification in CLICS⁴, but it also explicitly encodes the presence or absence of data at the level of the original questionnaire, or the individual language, elicited with the help of the questionnaire.

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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 open science must provide full documentation of all prompts and exchanges that were used to create a given study. A mere mention that AI tools have been used in study design, writing, or coding is not enough.

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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 how it can be used, and explain how we hope to expand it in the future.

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Standardizing Phonetic Transcriptions for Kitchen et al.’s Comparative Wordlist on Semitic Languages with Language-Specific Orthography Profiles

Comparative wordlists are a fundamental tool for tracing language history, allowing us to see how languages are related, much like biologists use DNA to infer phylogenies of species. When linguists compile data from different sources, scholars often code lexical data differently, using individual transcription systems that cannot be directly compared with each other. In order to make such data comparable, individual transcription systems must be unified in order to reflect a common standard. This study illustrates how such unification can be done by taking a particularly diverse dataset on Semitic languages as example and illustrating how transcriptions for individual language varieties can be harmonized as part of the general standardization workflow proposed by the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats initiative.

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Manipulating Lexical Forms with the PyLexibank FormSpec

Multilingual lexical data is typically stored in a wide variety of forms, based on many idiosyncratic decisions that vary from dataset to dataset. Here, a simple but efficient solution for the manipulation of lexical data in multilingual wordlists will be introduced. This solution, the PyLexibank FormSpec, was originall developed for the conversion of various kinds of lexical data to Cross-Linguistic Data Formats, but it can also be used as a standalone. This study offers a basic tutorial that illustrates how the FormSpec can be put to concrete use.

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Illustrating Data Curation in NoRaRe with the Help of Templates

This study introduces a collection of templates that can be used to contribute data to the Database of Norms, Ratings, and Relations (NoRaRe) of words and concepts. The templates are intended to facilitate the process of dataset conversion and serve as a starting point for those who are interested to contribute data to the catalog. A first template structure with two sample datasets is introduced and discussed in more detail, pointing to those aspects of data curation that may lead to confusion among users who contribute the first time to the NoRaRe database.
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Digitizing Legacy Lexical Data of Muishaung for Computer-Assisted Language Comparison

This study describes the process of digitizing legacy materials into a computer-readable format for the purposes of computational typology and computer-assisted historical reconstruction. It presents a comparative wordlist that is made available in the formats recommended by the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats initiative.

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Making a Lexibank Dataset from Lee’s “Phonological Features of Caijia” from 2023

Caijia is a very interesting Sino-Tibetan language variety. It has been documented only recently, it seems to belong to the Sinitic branch of Sino-Tibetan, but shows some archaic features that have led to some controversies among scholars regarding its proper affiliation, and detailed comparative analyses of the language in comparison with other Sino-Tibetan languages are still in their infancy. This little study demonstrates how a first published wordlist of Caijia (Lee 2023) can be prepared for the inclusion in the Lexibank repository.
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Extracting Transparent Compounds from Lexibank

Many languages make use of transparent compounding processes in order to express certain words in their lexicon. With time, these processes can loose their transparency, making them hard to detect automatically. With large data collections simple tests can be designed to detect transparent compounds and investigate their distribution. This study illustrates how a very rudimentary analysis of cross-linguistically recurring transparent compound patterns can be applied to Lexibank data with a few lines of Python code.

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PyLexibench — Generating Data for Lexibench with a Python Package

With PyLexibench we introduce a small Python package that can be used to populate the Lexibench benchmark for computational historical linguistics with benchmark data. Here, we introduce the package and show how it helps to access and expand Lexibench. We also introduce new data for character matrices in various forms and formats and lay out how we intend to use the package to manage Lexibench releases in the future.

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