Archive for German
Straßburger Abenrot
Posted in pictures, Running, Travel, University life with tags ABC, Alsace, bitcoin, blockchain, city walk, day trip, German, habilitation, high speed train, homonym, Ill River, jatp, jury, Jussieu, Petite France, Saint Paul's church, Strasbourg, sunset on April 27, 2026 by xi'an
…no el xe un pèse!!!
Posted in Kids, pictures, Travel with tags Austria, Austro-Hungary, Carlo Goldoni, Der Nord Wal, Friuli-Venezia, Gallo-Italic languages, German, Giacomo Casanova, Indo-European languages, Italy, Latin, maps, Old Norse, Republic of Venice, Romance language, tee-shirt, TNF, Venetan, Veneto, Venezia, whales on May 19, 2025 by xi'an
And here is the Venetan version of the nuova fanèla (tee-shirt), as suggested by my friend, co-author, and former PhD student Roberto Casarin, who hosted a fantastic ISBA last summer (and kindly looked after me while in ospedale!). Meaning this is not a fish! (If possibly a whale?!) For a better design Antoine and I had to give up the accent in pèse, much to my dismay. (End of the TNF series!)
…Der Nord Wal, but…
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Travel with tags Austria, Austro-Hungary, Der Nord Wal, French Revolution, German, Italy, maps, Napoléon Bonaparte, Napoleonic wars, narwhal, Old Norse, Republic of Venice, tee-shirt, TNF, Treaty of Campo Formio, Venetian, Venezia, whales, Yosemite on May 18, 2025 by xi'an
This new version in TNF memes came to life during my stay in Venezia last summer, as the fish or whale analogy struck me (after so many visits!). The German wording of the North whale afforded a proximity to the original brand without sharing a single word with said brand (and no connection with either the North Wall in Yosemite or the narwhal species, whose etymology link to the Old Norse for corpse-skinned whale). Antoine Luciano improved my early sketch of a three-part simplified map into the above (cutting out Santa Croce and inflating Giudecca) et voilà !
However, using a German motto for the map of Venezia may sound offensive to Venetian ears, reminding them of the 50 years of Austrian occupation—with both Napoléon Bonaparte and Napoléon III involved in the matter—, I consulted locals for another version and…
histories of sign languages
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags AAAS, American, Austrian, Bayesian computational methods, British, Chinese, computational phylogenetics, Czech, deaf people, Edinburgh, Estonian, French, German, Hong Kong, Italian, Japanese, language history, Latvian, Lithuanian, MCMC, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, New Zealand, phylogenetic models, phylogenetic tree, Polish, Russian, Science, Scotland, sign language, Spanish, Taiwan, Ukrainian on February 8, 2024 by xi'an
Congrats to Grégoire Clarté (now in Edinburgh) and Robin Ryder who, along with coauthors from several instutions, published an article in Science this week about the philogenetic tree of (Asian and European) sign languages for the deaf people. Part of Grégoire’s thesis contained preliminary work on this problem.
Abstract
Sign languages are naturally occurring languages. As such, their emergence and spread reflect the histories of their communities. However, limitations in historical recordkeeping and linguistic documentation have hindered the diachronic analysis of sign languages. In this work, we used computational phylogenetic methods to study family structure among 19 sign languages from deaf communities worldwide. We used phonologically coded lexical data from contemporary languages to infer relatedness and suggest that these methods can help study regular form changes in sign languages. The inferred trees are consistent in key respects with known historical information but challenge certain assumed groupings and surpass analyses made available by traditional methods. Moreover, the phylogenetic inferences are not reducible to geographic distribution but do affirm the importance of geopolitical forces in the histories of human languages.
