Linguists can never solely concentrate on language. This is especially true for field linguists who document a previously unknown language. Unveiling the charm of an undocumented language requires the researcher to explore as much as possible about the people, the society, and of course, the nature around them.
Category Archives: Methodology
Biological metaphors and methods in historical linguistics (1): Introduction
Evolutionary biology and historical linguistics share a long history of scientific exchange, reflected both not only in the sharing and transfer of metaphors but more recently also in the transfer of methods. Already Charles Darwin claimed that both species and languages evolve in tree-like patterns, and linguists, like Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, used terms like “sprachliche[n] Biologie” (‘linguistic biology’) when referring to the history of languages (Meyer-Lübke 1890, x). While the discipline of historical-comparative linguistics allowed biologists to adopt evolutionary thought against religious dogma in the late 19th century (Wells 1987: 54), it was biological applications which opened up the possibility of large quantitative studies in linguistics based on computational approaches (Geisler and List 2013, 111).