Johann-Mattis List | |
---|---|
Born | |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf |
Thesis | Sequence Comparison in Historical Linguistics (2013) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Linguistics |
Sub-discipline | |
Institutions | Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology |
Notable works | Concepticon |
Website | lingulist |
Johann-Mattis List (born 16 July 1981 in Kassel, Germany) is a German scientist. He is known for his work on quantitative comparative linguistics. List is currently professor at the University of Passau, Germany, where he leads the Chair of Multilingual Computational Linguistics. [1]
List graduated summa cum laude from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in 2013. He completed his habilitation from the University of Jena in 2021, where he completed a dissertation titled Computer-Assisted Approaches to Historical Language Comparison. [2]
Throughout much of his research career, List has worked on projects such as Cross-Linguistic Linked Data (CLLD), Lexibank, [3] and the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP). [4] He has also co-authored various papers on computational language phylogeny, including on the Sino-Tibetan languages, [5] [6] and has introduced the concept of incomplete lineage sorting in historical linguistics. [7]
Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. Around 1.4 billion people speak a Sino-Tibetan language. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Sinitic languages. Other Sino-Tibetan languages with large numbers of speakers include Burmese and the Tibetic languages. Other languages of the family are spoken in the Himalayas, the Southeast Asian Massif, and the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Most of these have small speech communities in remote mountain areas, and as such are poorly documented.
The Central Solomon languages are the four Papuan languages spoken in the state of Solomon Islands.
The Cishan culture was a Neolithic culture in northern China, on the eastern foothills of the Taihang Mountains. The Cishan culture was based on the farming of broomcorn millet, the cultivation of which on one site has been dated back 10,000 years. The people at Cishan also began to cultivate foxtail millet around 8700 years ago. However, these early dates have been questioned by some archaeologists due to sampling issues and lack of systematic surveying.
Quantitative comparative linguistics is the use of quantitative analysis as applied to comparative linguistics. Examples include the statistical fields of lexicostatistics and glottochronology, and the borrowing of phylogenetics from biology.
The Kho-Bwa languages, also known as Kamengic, are a small family of languages spoken in Arunachal Pradesh, northeast India. The name Kho-Bwa was originally proposed by George van Driem (2001). It is based on the reconstructed words *kho ("water") and *bwa ("fire"). Blench (2011) suggests the name Kamengic, from the Kameng area of Arunachal Pradesh. Alternatively, Anderson (2014) refers to Kho-Bwa as Northeast Kamengic.
The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non-Sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken throughout the Southeast Asian Massif ("Zomia") as well as parts of East Asia and South Asia. Around 60 million people speak Tibeto-Burman languages. The name derives from the most widely spoken of these languages, Burmese and the Tibetic languages, which also have extensive literary traditions, dating from the 12th and 7th centuries respectively. Most of the other languages are spoken by much smaller communities, and many of them have not been described in detail.
Laurent Sagart is a senior researcher at the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale unit of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).
Guillaume Jacques is a French linguist who specializes in the study of Sino-Tibetan languages: Old Chinese, Tangut, Tibetan, Gyalrongic and Kiranti languages. He also performs research on the Algonquian and Siouan language families and publishes about languages of other families such as Breton. His case studies in historical phonology are set in the framework of panchronic phonology, aiming to formulate generalizations about sound change that are independent of any particular language or language group.
Proto-Tibeto-Burman is the reconstructed ancestor of the Tibeto-Burman languages, that is, the Sino-Tibetan languages, except for Chinese. An initial reconstruction was produced by Paul K. Benedict and since refined by James Matisoff. Several other researchers argue that the Tibeto-Burman languages sans Chinese do not constitute a monophyletic group within Sino-Tibetan, and therefore that Proto-Tibeto-Burman was the same language as Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
Gyalrong or rGyalrong, also rendered Jiarong, or sometimes Gyarung, is a subbranch of the Gyalrongic languages spoken by the Gyalrong people in Western Sichuan, China. Lai et al. (2020) refer to this group of languages as East Gyalrongic.
The Rung languages are a proposed branch of Sino-Tibetan languages. The branch was proposed by Randy LaPolla on the basis of morphological evidence such as pronominal paradigms. However, Guillaume Jacques and Thomas Pellard (2021) argues that these languages do not constitute a monophyly based on recent phylogenetic studies and on a thorough investigation of shared lexical innovations.
The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) is a collaborative project applying computational approaches to comparative linguistics using a database of word lists. The database is open access and consists of 40-item basic-vocabulary lists for well over half of the world's languages. It is continuously being expanded. In addition to isolates and languages of demonstrated genealogical groups, the database includes pidgins, creoles, mixed languages, and constructed languages. Words of the database are transcribed into a simplified standard orthography (ASJPcode). The database has been used to estimate dates at which language families have diverged into daughter languages by a method related to but still different from glottochronology, to determine the homeland (Urheimat) of a proto-language, to investigate sound symbolism, to evaluate different phylogenetic methods, and several other purposes.
Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST) is the hypothetical linguistic reconstruction of the Sino-Tibetan proto-language and the common ancestor of all languages in it, including the Sinitic languages, the Tibetic languages, Yi, Bai, Burmese, Karen, Tangut, and Naga. Paul K. Benedict (1972) placed a particular emphasis on Old Chinese, Classical Tibetan, Jingpho, Written Burmese, Garo, and Mizo in his discussion of Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
The Cross-Linguistic Linked Data (CLLD) project coordinated over a dozen linguistics databases covering the languages of the world. It is hosted by the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
The Chamdo languages are a group of recently discovered, closely related Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Chamdo Prefecture, Tibet. Their position within the Sino-Tibetan language family is currently uncertain.
Simon James Greenhill is a New Zealand scientist who works on the application of quantitative methods to the study of cultural evolution and human prehistory. He is well known for creating and building various linguistics databases, including the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database, TransNewGuinea.org, Pulotu, and many others. In addition to Austronesian, he has contributed to the study of the phylogeny of many language families, including Dravidian and Sino-Tibetan.
Concepticon is an open-source online lexical database of linguistic concept lists. It links concept labels in concept lists to concept sets.
The West Gyalrongic languages constitute a group of Gyalrongic languages. On the basis of both morphological and lexical evidence, Lai et al. (2020) add the extinct Tangut language to West Gyalrongic. Beaudouin (2023) through a morphosyntactic analysis based on phonetic correspondences, shows that Tangut should be included within the Horpa languages.
Lexibank is a linguistics database managed by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The database consists of over 100 standardized wordlists (datasets) that are independently curated.
PHOIBLE is a linguistic database accessible through its website and compiling phonological inventories from primary documents and tertiary databases into a single, easily searchable sample. The 2019 version 2.0 includes 3,020 inventories containing 3,183 segment types found in 2,186 distinct languages. It is edited by Steven Moran, Assistant Professor from the Institute of Biology at the University of Neuchâtel and Daniel McCloy, Researcher at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington.