In this month's post, I want to provide some general remarks on rhyming and rhyme practice. I hope that they will help lay the foundati...

If you want to annoy a linguist, then there are three easy ways to do so: ask them how many languages they speak; ask them for their opini...

The first task on my list of 10 open problems in computational diversity linguistics deals with morphemes , that is, the minimal meaning-...

I was preparing a blog post on phylogenetic methods for the study of the Divine Comedy , by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), and it occurred to...

Google Trends looks at recent trends in web searches, and it has been used to study patterns in web activity for many concepts. This is si...

In an earlier blog post , I expressed my scepticism regarding the scientific value of non-transparent machine learning approaches, which on...

A little over a week ago I was at a workshop "Capturing phylogenetic algorithms for linguistics" at the Lorentz Centre in Leiden...

Most computational approaches to historical linguistics, be it those producing networks or those producing trees, make use of lexical data...

Genotypes or phenotypes? In a blogpost from 2013 , David investigated some of the popular analogies between anthropology (including lin...

What is a language? It is not easy to define exactly, what a language is . We find one reason for this in the daily use of the word “lan...