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.
This small study shows how data for an artificially created language that was supposed to reflect features of “proto-languages”, predating modern languages by several thousand years, can be used in testing computational approaches in historical linguistics. In order to do so, computational workflow is described that retrieves the data automatically, creating a comparative wordlist compatible in format with software tools for historical linguistics, and then uses a baseline method for automatic cognate detection to compare an artificial language against a sample of Indo-European languages. The results show that artificial languages might help to fill a gap in testing that has so far been ignored in the literature.
In the Concepticon project, we add more concept lists, improve the links to concept sets, and discuss ambiguous cases regularly. With every new release, the Concepticon is updated and the changes are published. Here, I discuss the improvements we integrated into the newest version: Concepticon 3.1. After covering the new lists that were added to Concepticon in this release, I describe the process of refining concept relations and mappings. I also demonstrate how we deal with inconsistencies in the data we encounter using the example of a wordlist that proved to be inconsistent. The aim is to inform about the processes and discussions that led to the new version of Concepticon.
A long time ago I prepared an animated demo of the Wagner-Fischer algorithm for pairwise sequence alignment. Having used the demo to teach phonetic alignment in class, I thought it might be useful to share it officially, as it may also be interesting for colleagues who teach phonetic alignment or rudimentary JavaScript programming.
