This is somewhat old news since the dataset (v1.0) has already been available since the publication of the analysis paper in Science two years ago, but since that paper was finally published, we (mainly Cormac Anderson and Paul Heggarty who wrote most of the paper) finally have been able to publish The Indo-European Cognate Relationships…
It has been long recognised that the lexicon of Ancient Greek contains a substantial proportion of vocabulary from non-Greek sources that is often referred to as “Pre-Greek”. Questions over the nature of whatever Pre-Greek or several Pre-Greek languages was or were left aside, estimations vary over the relative proportion of prehistoric loanwords to inherited vocabulary.…
It feels like it has been a very long time since I first met Paul Heggarty at the McDonald Institute in Cambridge during the summer of 2015 to chat about joining what was supposed to be a simple one-year project to revise the IELex dataset used in the Indo-European phylolinguistic studies Bouckaert et al. (2012)…
I was waiting for my author copies to arrive before making an official blog post announcing the publication so I could include some pretty photographs of the real physical thing, but it has been out for a month now and it is officially orderable from the publisher’s website and I feel the need to make…
Over the Easter break, besides reviewing and returning the second proofs of my forthcoming book (yay), I decided to relax (your definition of relax might differ) by finally getting a start on another project that I’d been threatening to do for a little while. I have been wanting to do a linguistic study of the…
Baltic is one of the branches of Indo-European that I am not quite so familiar with, so there remains the possibility that I may have missed something obvious from this instalment of Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries for the Perplexed. The situation is not particularly helped by the fact that many of these etymological dictionaries are in…
So I was tagged in a tweet yesterday: And, okay, since I was tagged I too am willing to give my own opinions, but I think Twitter is not really the most productive format for listing off various reading recommendations and putting on some nuanced commentary on where they are good, what their shortcomings are,…
As you may have guessed on the basis of some of the blog posts over the last year I’ve been coping with pandemic isolation by spending a lot more time on gaming, and I’ve been keeping an eye out for archaeological and linguistic curiosities I find along the way. The latest completely unexpected thing I’ve…
I meant to blog about this once it was out, although I was having troubles with the WordPress editor and then forgot. Anyway, now that it’s two weeks later and I remembered again: an article that I’ve had in-press for a considerable time has now appeared. Its title is “Bactrian χϸονο ‘(calendar) year, (regnal) year’”…
Since finishing my grading at the beginning of last week I have managed to settle in for a nice and quiet socially-distanced Christmas break. Of course, what that means is that I have suddenly had an extra amount of free time on my hands to play video games. The new game of the season that…
Part VII.1: Indic Etymological Dictionaries This will be the first of two (or three) posts on the main etymological dictionaries available for the Indo-Iranic sub-branch of the Indo-European languages, starting with the Indic (or Indo-Aryan) sub-branch which comprises the three main branches of Indo-Iranic, namely Indic, Iranic, and Nuristani. The Indic sub-branch of Indo-European needs,…
To judge from the June 8th timestamp on the tweet I found this from this morning from the official University of Cambridge Twitter feed (retweeted this morning by the official Cambridge Faculty of Classics twitter account), I guess I’m a couple of weeks late to noticing that this has been finally made public, but nevertheless…
My previous experience with Coptic was learning it around twelve years ago now when it was offered as a one-off course offering at the University of Alberta during my undergraduate time, and being a massive language nerd, I simply could not say no. When I first learned, and this was in Fall 2007 if I…
Last night as I was digging through some boxes of stuff trying to find my long-buried copy of Donald Redford’s Akhenaten: The Heretic King, I stumbled across a bunch of old BA and MA coursework stuff that I had saved. A lot of it was pretty cringe to look at, but among this was a…
Part 9.1: Etymological Dictionaries of Old Italic (Latin & Sabellic) This is the first of two posts that I have envisaged writing for Italic and the Romance languages. It seems to make the most sense to me to treat Old Italic separate from Romance because of the internal diversity of Old Italic with respect to…
Consulting Philologist 