In a recent interdisciplinary study, Das et al. have attempted to trace the homeland of Ashkenazi Jews and of their historical language, Yiddish (Das et al. 2016 Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to Primeval Villages in the Ancient Iranian Lands of Ashkenaz. Genome Biol Evol. 8:1132-1149). Das et al. applied the geographic population structure (GPS) method to autosomal genotyping data and inferred geo...

Based on specific linguistic landmarks in the speech signal, this study investigates pitch level and pitch span differences in English, German, Bulgarian and Polish. The analysis is based on 22 speakers per language (11 males and 11 females). Linear mixed models were computed that include various linguistic measures of pitch level and span, revealing characteristic differences across languages ...

In this study, we explore how direct speech is portrayed in English and Spanish SPEECH FRAMING EXPRESSIONS (SFEs). The study has two aims. Firstly, we survey the use of verbs in SFEs and offer a comprehensive inventory of those verbs in English and Spanish as representatives of Germanic and Romance languages respectively in order to determine what verb meanings are used to cue direct speech, wh...

Noun incorporation in Frisian (Dyk 1997) is unusual because it shows certain restrictions that are not seen in other languages with noun incorporation, such as Mohawk and Chukchi. In addition, while others argue that noun incorporation is indeed possible in Germanic (see Booij 2009 for Dutch, Barrie and Spreng 2009 for German), Frisian is unusual even with respect to Germanic in allowing noun i...