New Paper Appeared

Our paper (with Nicolás Brid and Cristina Messineo) on "A comparative wordlist for the languages of The Gran Chaco, South America" was now formally accepted by Open Research Europe and can thus be considered as fully "published". You can find the study here.

Home to more than twenty indigenous languages belonging to six linguistic families, the Gran Chaco has raised the interest of many linguists from different backgrounds. While some have focused on finding deeper genetic relations between different language groups, others have looked into similarities from the perspective of areal linguistics. In order to contribute to further research of areal and genetic features among these languages, we have compiled a comparative wordlist consisting of translational equivalents for 326 concepts — representing basic and ethnobiological vocabulary — for 26 language varieties. Since the data were standardized in various ways, they can be analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. In order to illustrate this in detail, we have carried out an initial computer-assisted analysis of parts of the data by searching for shared lexicosemantic patterns resulting from structural rather than direct borrowings.