Areal linguistics and etymology

Non-Parametric Bayesian Areal Linguistics

We describe a statistical model over linguistic areas and phylogeny. Our model recovers known areas and identifies a plausible hierarchy of areal features. The use of areas improves genetic reconstruction of languages both qualitatively and quantitatively according to a variety of metrics. We model linguistic areas by a Pitman-Yor process and linguistic phylogeny by Kingman’s coalescent.

Areal Linguistics and Mainland Southeast Asia

Mainland Southeast Asia provides a dramatic demonstration of the areal phenomenon in linguistics: When languages are spoken historically in the same location they often show significant parallels in the organization of a wide range of structural domains, whether the languages descend from the same historical source. The effects of areal diffusion raise fundamental questions for the traditional ...

Etymology, history, and artifacts

Elliptic really does have a connection with literal geometric ellipses, removed by a few steps. Integrals expressing arc length of ellipses are less elementary than integrals for inverse trigonometric functions, and were named elliptic because of this. Abel and Jacobi discovered in 1827 that the inverse functions are doubly periodic (explained below). This chain of events caused these functions...

Medical Etymology

Linguistic landscaping of South Asia using digital language resources: Genetic vs. areal linguistics

Like many other research fields, linguistics is entering the age of big data. We are now at a point where it is possible to see how new research questions can be formulated – and old research questions addressed from a new angle or established results verified – on the basis of exhaustive collections of data, rather than small, carefully selected samples. For example, South Asia is often mentio...