New Concepticon Release and New Paper Appeared

There are a couple of news in different categories to be shared. First, a new version of the CLLD Concepticon was published last week. The new version adds several new concept lists and is crucial for the upcoming new version of Lexibank.

Then, another paper appeared in the journal Moderna, together with Hans Geisler, titled "Of word families and language trees. New and old metaphors in studies on language history" (DOI: 10.19272/202201902005).

For a long time, metaphors have played an important role in depicting language history. In this study, we contrast early metaphors on language history, such as the family tree or the wave model, with recent metaphors that were popularized after the quantitative turn, such as forests of trees or phylogenetic networks. Speculating about metaphors which could become important in the future, we conclude that a vivid discussion about the usefulness and the concrete implications of metaphors plays a key role for the development of models for language history in historical linguistics.

This study is unfortunately under closed access, as the open access fees seemed too high to us for a study providing merely a review, but a preprint is freely available, and an author copy can be shared upon request.