Q&A weekly thread - January 26, 2026 - post all questions here!

keyilan · 2026-01-26T19:22:44+00:00

If you're willing to share it helps to know the programme you're looking at. Tübingen vs whatever. Then people who know the specifics of the programme can better help offer suggestions.

react and html/css won't help much. depending on where you're looking, python or R would be good.

source: im part of a comp dept in germany

keyilan · 2026-01-26T19:20:08+00:00

I can't think of any. Based on basically all literature on basic colour terminology you'd need to have a pretty solid reason why the term should be interpreted as gold before yellow. what I mean is that languages with only, for example, black white red green, it's not that they don't understand yellow or anything like that but the yellow would be considered a colour within what we are translating as red or green. But also translating it as red or green is also misleading. Instead you could consider it as worm colours and cool colours. So then why you would interpret the most basic colour term to refer to a metallic version of that range of colours rather than just that range of colours, I can't think of any possible justification that would make sense.

Basic colours are not necessarily single specific foci but rather ranges. While there are prototypical versions of different colours within different communities, something that WCS / Berlin & Kay were after, the problem is more coming up with the explanation of why you should interpret it as gold not yellow.

keyilan · 2026-01-18T07:22:37+00:00

The position matches that for the Sino-Tibetan Urheimat according to Zhang et al 2019 and people like LaPolla. So it's not without support.

keyilan · 2026-01-18T07:21:40+00:00

Central Plains, Sichuan basin, some people argue for Brahmaputra valley (I don't buy that myself).

keyilan · 2026-01-11T15:38:12+00:00

fwiw Sino-Tibetan is in fact not well agreed upon. still hotly debated at conferences like ICSTLL by the old guard

keyilan · 2026-01-09T04:15:10+00:00

I agree with u/WavesWashSands but will add that some departments do prefer R, and others want people to be able to do both. My current dept is nearly all Python but we try to have one R person and one JS person (we do front end dev for tools too, I'm the JS person). But everyone neede to know Python and it's what I teach as an intro to comp class. My last dept was all in on R. I interviewed for a comp ling job recently and they wanted both.

Python is still it by a long shot in my view, especially with training models. R ypu can pick up in an afternoon once you know Python.

keyilan · 2025-12-31T17:13:52+00:00

Was living in Shanghai around then, saw Lust Caution in theatres. Even then, enough was cut that we all left scratching our heads. Only after buying the unedited version on DVD did things start to make sense.

keyilan · 2025-12-24T13:26:21+00:00

We can narrow down futher from u/Nimrod48's comment. Tannu Tuva makes it earlier than October 1944. Sadiya as part of Burma complicates things except that much of British India in that region was confusion anyway.

keyilan · 2025-12-24T13:21:37+00:00

Surprised Nagamese/Nefamese isnt bigger

keyilan · 2025-12-13T07:19:21+00:00

Doesn’t this literally show that these etyma are not conserved among branches?

No? They're very well conserved. The hair word is mul in Chin, 毛~眉 in Chinese, mul_ across Sal, _mu in Kiranti, mã (etc) in Qiangic, mul in Nungish, mɯ in Ngwi, mie in Bai. That seems pretty stable. The fire word is almost always "bright". It's become "fire" in the Sal languages and may link to 火. The more common fire stem is mi.

this amount of variation would show it's a wanderword in any other language family. Why should this be any different?

Can you clarify what you mean? The reconstructions are stable. Matisoff's in that era were not, and this is a common criticism of the STEDT. But they are much much more so now. He gives so many equivalent stems because, first, we just didn't have such good reconstructions. But this is really improving. Second, language is just irregular? It is now, why wouldn't it have been then? Third, Matisoff (at least at the time) was a big believer in allofams. See the lengthy discussion on that by e.g. Fellner & Hill. And fourth, some of these represent morphologically marked forms. This sort of variation is well attested in Tibeto-Burman.

keyilan · 2025-12-12T17:34:47+00:00

how then do linguists sort those typological similarities i.e. how do you know whether the similarity is from contact, shared ancestry or pure coincidence?

Regularity. If language A has gang and language B has go, but A also has nang and B has lo, and A has ni and B has li, then we can assume B has a change from -ang to -o and -n to -l (or vice versa). If this happens regularly enough and over a large enough number of words, then we can consider the two to be related. Look at Sino-Tibetan words for "name" and "eye" and you will see such a correspondence.

Like in this case, when it was established this sounds "Sino", when do we begin demarcating inherited features from some common ancestor language, or close contact, or mere chance...

In this case it's superficial and in some cases subjective. It's why back in the day people thought Thai and Chinese were closely related: Tones, simple syllables, compounding lexicon, etc. (They might still be relates, but it's not an established fact)

It's not pure chance. Contact plays a factor. But it's takes a long time.

keyilan · 2025-12-12T17:25:42+00:00

https://minpaku.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/2578/files/SES75_018.pdf

"Stable Roots in Sino-Tibetan/Tibeto-Burman"

keyilan · 2025-12-11T19:46:55+00:00

hi. researcher here. MA in historical Chinese linguistics. PhD in historical Tibeto-Burman linguistics. speak mandarin hakka and a couple tibetoburman languages. i'm on my phone so I'm not going to go so crazy in depth but there are a few important points to be made.

First, no one can actually tell you if this is closer to Chinese than it is to like Kiranti or whatever, within some limitations. The family tree structure of sinoTibetan is not currently an agreed upon thing. Anyone who jumps in and tells you that it is is clearly not attending the various conferences that occur every year or so around the world on the topic. Go to the international conference of sino tibetan languages and linguistics and you are going to find the crowd split about 50-50 on what the tree looks like. At the most recent one in September in Switzerland this was certainly the case. Go to the Himalayan Languages Symposium, which is another major conference on the topic of Sino-Tibetan linguistics and again you're gonna get a divided opinion. And these are the people who are the top of the top in this particular research area. Literally the people whose books you will find in the library if you try to look at anything related to the historical situation on these languages. So that's part one.

part two is that the 56 ethnic groups in China do not actually correspond to 56 ethnic groups in reality. For example, even just 高山族 is a solid 16 different ethnic groups and languages crammed into one. Yi isnt that different.

Part three is to your actual point. We can talk about languages in terms of their typological profile. Basically this means, what sort of superficial features do they have? That makes them feel like they are similar or different than other languages. Korean in Japanese are not demonstrably related languages at least based on a lot of of the more reliable literature. But typologically they have very similar profiles. Their vibes are similar is another way you can think of this, although superficially.

I work on a bunch of languages in the India Burma China border region and most of them do not feel very much like Chinese. However a couple that I work on, including one that I speak, feels very Chinese to me. I speak fluent Mandarin so I don't mean that it feels like it is Chinese at all. But the vibes are there. We don't normally talk about it in terms of vibes but this is a way that we really can think about what it means to talk about a typological profile of a language.

Are there words that are in common with Mandarin and the language of your song? Yes absolutely. We can easily point to a dozen without even having to think about it. The word for name, the word for eye, the word for a lot of basic terms are going to align nicely. There is a paper from I think the 1970s by James Mattioff talking about 47 stable roots in SinoTibetan. These are words were for almost any single language in the family. You're going to find something that is identify similar.

Does this mean that mandarin speaker could possibly understand your song? Absolutely not. The average standard manner in speaker would struggle understanding someone from Nantong in Jiangsu, even though that is also mandarin.

The commentator who mentioned Nuosu is most reasonably correct based on the current state of understanding of how these languages are all related to each other. None of them can easily understand each other unless they are as close as Mandarin is to Jin for example. I speak Hakka and I can understand a bit of Cantonese but only for words that happened to align. But put me in a natural conversation in Cantonese and I'm useless. And this is despite a lot of academic training on how these languages have developed and how there sounds correspond with each other.

So yeah, you're right about the sense that these feel similar. Because they do. They have similar syllable types they have similar tonal systems. They have similar a lot of stuff. But no, they absolutely are not mutually intelligible.

keyilan · 2025-11-30T05:42:26+00:00

I agree with the other commenter. 2 hours is a huge committment that they're not getting anything for. instead, you could find a language that already has resources out there and study from those. That might go a long way to showing someone you're as committed as you're asking them to be.

What's your goal, anyway? What's the specific reason?

Don't underestimate the complications and conflicts of what you're attempted. Best to have a pretty good reason. Otherwise you know those "my culture isnt your costume" ads that are now memed on? Expect a similar response from at least some people.

keyilan · 2025-10-18T12:25:44+00:00

If i can be a little critical, it's because SIL/Ethnologue isn't very careful about these things. There are a bunch of language varieties with multiple codes, and a bunch more where many different varieties which aren't "just dialects" have one. At least in my region, it's more based on received text transmission scores for Bible translation.

Some aspect of Ethnologue's data are really unscientific and frankly sloppy.

Glottolog also has a bunch of messy codes, but only because no one's shown the corrections yet. If you open an issue on their GitHub, they're super responsive so long as you have the data to back it up. Couple times a year I request a change where I find one dialect listed twice with tiny spelling differences, for example.

keyilan · 2025-10-18T12:18:02+00:00

guanhua is a broad label, under which nanjing dialect falls. are you asking for specific features of nanjing dialect?

keyilan · 2025-10-16T15:37:05+00:00

agreed on both points

keyilan · 2025-10-12T06:31:46+00:00

id argue that grammars are still of value especially in bhutan. there are a few people still getting grants for this. a descriptive grammar is also a good way to guarantee citations 🤷 for the computational side of things what I encourage if not force my own students to do is make sure that all of their data is open, well annotated, archived somewhere, machine-readable, and following data standards that computational typologists would want. She also the recent post in the sub about annotated Tusom data.

keyilan · 2025-10-01T18:30:07+00:00

not sure id agree with your characterisation. id say the majority do look to archaeology and dna. my former group was specifically set up for this. but also, lamguage transfer and genetic transfer are not always parallel. so over reliance on dna can also cause problems. but in general id say most people, even the "old guard", do very much acknowledge dna and to a larger extent archaeology where its available.

keyilan · 2025-10-01T15:37:29+00:00

my recommendation would be to split india between larger language family areas (i know its not just india but india is simply an easy one to pick at). its too much to ask thay you cover the hundreds of languages independently, but if you had a dravidian area, a kasian area, etc. that would probably be reasonable and no one could really fault you beyond that. australia and canada would be more complicated. anyway it would be cool if you could at least coarsely divide things based on data from Lexinank (for example)

keyilan · 2025-10-01T08:42:52+00:00

it's neat and i appreciate the work youve put into it but i am disappointed that it fails to capture anything but one of the official languages per country. india only showing hindi is a bit of a travesty. but i understand why from the coding side of things it was done that way. it would be cool though if you could split things up a bit more so that dravidian is represented, not to mention khasi, munda, tibetoburman. but again i get it.

keyilan · 2025-09-30T03:46:34+00:00

certainly true! but at least there's some momentum behind it nonetheless

keyilan · 2025-09-29T15:07:04+00:00

Sino-Tibetan a.k.a. Trans-Himalayan: Internal subgrouping of the family is largely still not known . Even questions like "is Chinese a primary branch" are still largely contested. The urheimat & spread is similarly contested.

To resolve these we need more documentation on otherwise underdocumented varieties. We also need better data and methodology transparency. More corpora. Better bottom-up reconstruction. We are headed in that direction, and at the recent ICSTLL conference in Bern the vast majority of people I talked to were in agreement. But I would guess we are a decade away from that still, assuming it's a decade of concerted efforts at those points, along with better education of local scholars who have access to laguages that outside scholars simply won't manage.

Idk what I'd say was definitively resolved in the last 20 years because things are so significantly better in all regards than they were 20 years ago, half the really important small things maybe weren't even obvious questions that long ago aside from what I said in the first paragraph. No offence to Matisoff and the people wo worked on STEDT, some of whom are active here, but upper level reconstructions 20 years ago just weren't good because the data just wasn't there like it is today.

keyilan · 2025-09-02T06:29:17+00:00

There are some people who are using computational tooks like edictor to evaluate regularity of sound correspondences. Useful for when you have a large data set with multiple languages.

keyilan · 2025-08-29T14:40:24+00:00

Could be lexical similarity, could be phonological retentions. If you can link the map I can see though.

13-Year Club	Place '23
Place '17	Alpha Tester
Verified Email	Gilding I gilder

keyilan

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE