Colexifications have enjoyed a considerable amount of popularity in the recent years. However, there are still many semantic domains, where not much research on colexification patterns has been carried out so far. Here we show, how the recently published Lexibank repository can be queried to yield colexification data on taste colexifications which can in turn be easily plotted on geographic maps.
A colexification network is a network consisting of concepts as nodes with weighted edges drawn between the nodes, indicating how often the concepts colexify across the data in a given sample of languages. Having seen how individual colexifications can be computed with the help of the CL Toolkit package in an earlier blog post, we will now see how this code needs to be extended in order to compute colexification networks.
Colleagues often ask us how they could receive more detailed information on specific languages and colexifications in the CLICS database. With the publication of the CL Toolkit package, which allows to merge several CLDF datasets on the fly, carrying out analyses on certain parts of the data underlying the CLICS database is now much easier than before. In order to illustrate this, this tutorial shows how colexifications for a selected number of languages can be computed from two distinct datasets that are included in CLICS (Version 3).
Rooting of phylogenetic trees is an important task, not only in evolutionary biology, but also in historical linguistics. So far, however, different rooting methods have not yet been sufficiently tested on linguistics data. Given that a new method for the automatic rooting of phylogenetic trees has been presented recently in biology, it seemed to be a good occasion to test in detail how well this new method works in comparison with alternative methods.
A major problem for data reuse in computer-assisted historical linguistics, especially when employing data collected with no computational workflows in mind, is linking datasets in terms of the meanings of the words (or, technically, “forms”) they carry. Just as linking languages across different datasets is not as straightforward as one might naively assume, demanding a complex reference catalog such as Glottolog, linking the concepts used in a wordlist (a “concept list”) to our Concepticon project might well be the most intensive task in preparing a dataset for cross-linguistic studies.
Following up on my announcement to present in more detail how the algorithms for automatic correspondence pattern detection can be applied, this post introduces the preliminary preparations needed to run a first experiment with aligned data. In order to avoid that we have to align a dataset completely from scratch, we make use of already aligned data from the Tableaux Phonétiques des Patois Suisses Romands by Gauchat et al. (1925), which were originally aligned for the study in List (2014) and later published as part of the Benchmark Database of Phonetic Alignments(List and Prokić 2014). In this post, I will introduce how we can harvest the alignments from this dataset with help of LingPy, and later analyze them with help of the sound correspondence pattern algorithms.
