Tag Archives: Sino-Tibetan

Creating a Standardized Comparative Wordlist of Newari Varieties

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Newari is one of the few ancient Sino-Tibetan languages attested in written texts. Since previous studies on the phylogeny of Sino-Tibetan did not take Newari data into account, we felt it is important to close this gap by providing an up-to-date comparative wordlist of Newari varieties. This wordlist has now been finalized in a first version that has additionally been standardized following the recommendations of the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats initiative.
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Linguists love plants, too!

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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.

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Behind the Sino-Tibetan Database of Lexical Cognates: Concept selection

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One of the crucial steps in creating a database of lexical cognates is the selection of concepts one wants to use for a given study. While many scholars use the classical Swadesh list of 200 items) (Swadesh 1952) for this purpose, or the combined list of 207 items, in which the former has been merged with Swadesh’s updated list of 100 items (Swadesh 1955), and which is often mistakenly attributed to Swadesh himself, although the first official reference seems to be Comrie (1977), it is useful to give the selection of concepts some more thought initially.

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