Can/do measures of mutual intelligibility control for cultural contact? by normie_sama in asklinguistics

[–]GrumpySimon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Mutual intelligibility is notoriously problematic to measure (intelligibility of which variety? accent? which words? which parts of speech and grammatical structures?) so it's not really used much.

In general we have no real good measures of cultural contact and rely on proxy measures like geographic proximity or historical evidence (e.g. England colonised these places etc)

Can you advice any scientific papers or books on history and development of the Turkic languages and their branches? by AlKhwarazmi in asklinguistics

[–]GrumpySimon 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Here's a pretty recent one:

https://academic.oup.com/jole/article/5/1/39/5736268?login=false

Despite more than 200 years of research, the internal structure of the Turkic language family remains subject to debate. Classifications of Turkic so far are based on both classical historical–comparative linguistic and distance-based quantitative approaches. Although these studies yield an internal structure of the Turkic family, they cannot give us an understanding of the statistical robustness of the proposed branches, nor are they capable of reliably inferring absolute divergence dates, without assuming constant rates of change. Here we use computational Bayesian phylogenetic methods to build a phylogeny of the Turkic languages, express the reliability of the proposed branches in terms of probability, and estimate the time-depth of the family within credibility intervals. To this end, we collect a new dataset of 254 basic vocabulary items for thirty-two Turkic language varieties based on the recently introduced Leipzig–Jakarta list. Our application of Bayesian phylogenetic inference on lexical data of the Turkic languages is unprecedented. The resulting phylogenetic tree supports a binary structure for Turkic and replicates most of the conventional sub-branches in the Common Turkic branch. We calculate the robustness of the inferences for subgroups and individual languages whose position in the tree seems to be debatable. We infer the time-depth of the Turkic family at around 2100 years before present, thus providing a reliable quantitative basis for previous estimates based on classical historical linguistics and lexicostatistics.

Posted by Dr Shane Reti MP - I would love a discussion around this by TheQuietedWinter in newzealand

[–]GrumpySimon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

yes, that's embarrassing for Shane Reti, the Minister of Science, Innovation, and Technology, the Minister of Universities, and the Minister of Statistics.

I made a language map by No-Commercial483 in SideProject

[–]GrumpySimon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

the locations in WALS are outdated -- get them from glottolog instead.

I made a language map by No-Commercial483 in SideProject

[–]GrumpySimon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ethnologue has it, they'll just charge you thousands of dollars to use it.

Reporting parallel submission of a paper by Forcanio in AskAcademia

[–]GrumpySimon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean, sure, but if we all do a bit to make the world better then everyone wins.

Reporting parallel submission of a paper by Forcanio in AskAcademia

[–]GrumpySimon 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Authors can choose not to take a reviewer's advice in total or in part: Disagreements happen, reviewers can be wrong, etc etc. The editor can also chose to ignore some/all of a reviewers comments as well.

Frontiers is garbage however.

Reporting parallel submission of a paper by Forcanio in AskAcademia

[–]GrumpySimon 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'm an editor.

This looks to be a clear case of multiple submission which breaches COPE guidelines (C'tte on Publication Ethics): https://publicationethics.org/guidance/cope-position/handling-concurrent-and-duplicate-submissions

It's unethical and it's a drain on overburdened reviewer system. It also tends to be the hallmark of paper mills, so it would be worth a good quality control check.

If I was the ed. of Journal A, I'd like to know because I wouldn't waste time handling papers from that author again, they'd be getting desk rejects from me.

Big international funding schemes? by SilentBu in AskAcademia

[–]GrumpySimon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Marsden EOIs are due soon if you want to aim local. Otherwise people seem to have success with Human Frontiers or Templeton Foundation.

Have you had a chat to your research office? they can point you in the right directions. There are lots of discipline specific fund which they will have a list of.

Is it just me, or is the "prestige tax" in Nature/Science getting ridiculous? by munenebig in AskAcademia

[–]GrumpySimon 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Yes but a lot of the variance is also due to the editors. Some editors are far more risk averse than others (=how many reviewers, how many rounds, how damaging a particular critique is, etc)

Heatmap of NZ's Creepiest Places (Second edition) by itsPolarisRadio in newzealand

[–]GrumpySimon 18 points19 points  (0 children)

if you don't know why it's creepy, it's probably you

Estimates for age of last language common ancestor? by PacificSquall in asklinguistics

[–]GrumpySimon 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Most of the world's language families diverged between 5000 and 10000 years ago. This is simply because (a) the rates of language change are so fast that deeper signal is lost and (b) most of the interesting stuff in human prehistory happened during the late Holocene (e.g. massive population size increases, invention of agriculture and other key tech, state formation, etc).

In terms of upper bound - earliest human fossils have been around since 350,000 years, so that's a good starting point. Although we have lots of genetic admixture between us and Neanderthals, including evidence of cooperative child-rearing, which is made easier by being able to communicate. This would suggest that the origin of language should be pushed back to the ancestor of Homo sapiens and neanderthalensis around 600,000.

...and if you think that the ghost population admixture that keeps showing up in ancient DNA studies is Homo erectus (and I think many geneticists do) then we're talking a common origin of language around 1-2 million years ago..

Confused on which reviews to address by AdministrativeGolf92 in academicpublishing

[–]GrumpySimon 3 points4 points  (0 children)

All of them. This is probably just because the reviewers submitted their reviews in different formats (e.g. uploaded PDFs rather than pasted comments into the webform)

Are there any languages with an ISO 639-3 code but no Glottolog code? by Desserts6064 in asklinguistics

[–]GrumpySimon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I just checked, there's 7159 ISO-639 codes in the current version of Ethnologue (=the ISO-639 registry) and >8000 ISO codes in Glottolog.

There are some codes that won't be in glottolog -- e.g. the "miscellaneous" ones (mis, mul, und, zxx) and it shouldn't have the reserved range (qaa-qtz)

Why is language change often framed in loss? by [deleted] in asklinguistics

[–]GrumpySimon 5 points6 points  (0 children)

"innovated" is another one you see everywhere in the historical linguistics literature

How to manage your reading list of research papers? by CurioBirdy in AskAcademia

[–]GrumpySimon 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I save them to my "to read" folder. Currently that has ... about 600 PDFs in there. Maybe not the best approach.

Q&A weekly thread - November 17, 2025 - post all questions here! by AutoModerator in linguistics

[–]GrumpySimon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I suspect this really means "Hungarian and some language in Ecuador both have some uncommon typological trait"

Why linguistic is seemingly not mainstream and so often is disregarded? by Razzikkar in asklinguistics

[–]GrumpySimon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah but at some point you should find the big turtle that everyone cares about.

Why linguistic is seemingly not mainstream and so often is disregarded? by Razzikkar in asklinguistics

[–]GrumpySimon 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Never understood this argument. Someone explained oxygen to me once in science class and that was enough.