This article describes the first release version of a new lexicostatistical database of Northern
Eurasia, which includes Europe as the most well-researched linguistic area. Unlike in other …

Psychologists and linguists collect various data on word and concept properties. In
psychology, scholars have accumulated norms and ratings for a large number of words in …

All languages borrow words from other languages. Some languages are more prone to
borrowing, while others borrow less, and different domains of the vocabulary are unequally …

We probe the layers in multilingual BERT (mBERT) for phylogenetic and geographic
language signals across 100 languages and compute language distances based on the …

Introduction The directionality of semantic change is problematic in traditional comparative
models of language reconstruction. Compared to, eg, phonological and morphological …

While static embeddings have dominated computational approaches to lexical semantic
change for quite some time, recent approaches try to leverage the contextualized …

In recent years, techniques such as Bayesian inference of phylogeny have become a
standard part of the quantitative linguistic toolkit. While these tools successfully model the …

In speech, the connection between sounds and word meanings is mostly arbitrary. However,
among basic concepts of the vocabulary, several words can be shown to exhibit some …

Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery and are hypothesized to be
structurally marked, ie, exhibiting unique structural properties. In this paper,“marked” is …

Languages disfavor word forms containing sequences of similar or identical consonants,
due to the biomechanical and cognitive difficulties posed by patterns of this sort. However …