English Kumyk Lexicon

This English > Kumyk lexicon is based on the 200+ language 8,000 entry World Languages Dictionary CD of 2007 which was subsequently lodged in national libraries across the world. The corresponding Chinese lexicon has a vocabulary of 2,429 characters, 95% of which are in the primary group of 3,500 general standard Chinese characters issued by China's Ministry of Education in 2013.

Lexicon of Pulse Crops integrates botanical and linguistic data to analyze and interpret the grain legume significance from the earliest archaeological and written records until the present day. Aimed at both agronomic and linguistic research communities, this book presents a database containing 9,500 common names in more than 900 languages and dialects of all ethnolinguistic families, denoting more than 1,100 botanical taxa of 14 selected pulse crop genera and species. The book begins with overviews of the world’s economically most important grain legume crops and their uncultivated relatives, as well as the world’s language families with their inner structure, including both extinct and living members. The main section of the text presents 14 specialized book chapters covering Arachis, Cajanus, Cicer, Ervum, Faba, Glycine, Lablab, Lathyrus, Lens, Lupinus, Phaseolus, Pisum, Vicia, and Vigna. They provide the reader with extensive lists of the botanically accepted species and subtaxa and surveys lexicological abundance in all world’s ethnolinguistic families, comprising extinct and living as well as natural and constructed languages, while the vernacular names for the most significant taxa are presented in comprehensive tables. Each of these chapters also presents the existing etymologies and novel approaches to deciphering the origins of common names, accompanied by one original color plate depicting possible root evolutions in the form of corresponding pulse crop plants.

Based on analysis of more than 1,000 languages, this volume reconstructs more than 500 processes of grammatical change in the languages of the world.

This volume seeks to infer large phylogenetic networks from phonetically encoded lexical data and contribute in this way to the historical study of language varieties. The technical step that enables progress in this case is the use of causal inference algorithms. Sample sets of words from language varieties are preprocessed into automatically inferred cognate sets, and then modeled as information-theoretic variables based on an intuitive measure of cognate overlap. Causal inference is then applied to these variables in order to determine the existence and direction of influence among the varieties. The directed arcs in the resulting graph structures can be interpreted as reflecting the existence and directionality of lexical flow, a unified model which subsumes inheritance and borrowing as the two main ways of transmission that shape the basic lexicon of languages. A flow-based separation criterion and domain-specific directionality detection criteria are developed to make existing causal inference algorithms more robust against imperfect cognacy data, giving rise to two new algorithms. The Phylogenetic Lexical Flow Inference (PLFI) algorithm requires lexical features of proto-languages to be reconstructed in advance, but yields fully general phylogenetic networks, whereas the more complex Contact Lexical Flow Inference (CLFI) algorithm treats proto-languages as hidden common causes, and only returns hypotheses of historical contact situations between attested languages. The algorithms are evaluated both against a large lexical database of Northern Eurasia spanning many language families, and against simulated data generated by a new model of language contact that builds on the opening and closing of directional contact channels as primary evolutionary events. The algorithms are found to infer the existence of contacts very reliably, whereas the inference of directionality remains difficult. This currently limits the new algorithms to a role as exploratory tools for quickly detecting salient patterns in large lexical datasets, but it should soon be possible for the framework to be enhanced e.g. by confidence values for each directionality decision.

The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages provides a comprehensive account of the Transeurasian languages, and is the first major reference work in the field since 1965. The term 'Transeurasian' refers to a large group of geographically adjacent languages that includes five uncontroversial linguistic families: Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic. The historical connection between these languages, however, constitutes one of the most debated issues in historical comparative linguistics. In the present book, a team of leading international scholars in the field take a balanced approach to this controversy, integrating different theoretical frameworks, combining both functional and formal linguistics, and showing that genealogical and areal approaches are in fact compatible with one another. The volume is divided into five parts. Part I deals with the historical sources and periodization of the Transeurasian languages and their classification and typology. In Part II, chapters provide individual structural overviews of the Transeurasian languages and the linguistic subgroups that they belong to, while Part III explores Transeurasian phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, and semantics from a comparative perspective. Part IV offers a range of areal and genealogical explanations for the correlations observed in the preceding parts. Finally, Part V combines archaeological, genetic, and anthropological perspectives on the identity of speakers of Transeurasian languages. The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages will be an indispensable resource for specialists in Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages and for anyone with an interest in Transeurasian and comparative linguistics more broadly.

This book is the first work to address the question of what kinds of words get borrowed in a systematic and comparative perspective. It studies lexical borrowing behavior on the basis of a world-wide sample of 40 languages, both major languages and minor languages, and both languages with heavy borrowing and languages with little lexical influence from other languages. The book is the result of a five-year project bringing together a unique group of specialists of many different languages and areas. The introductory chapters provide a general up-to-date introduction to language contact at the word level, as well as a presentation of the project's methodology. All the chapters are based on samples of 1000-2000 words, elicited by a uniform meaning list of 1460 meanings. The combined database, comprising over 70,000 words, is published online at the same time as the book is published. For each word, information about loanword status is given in the database, and the 40 case studies in the book describe the social and historical contact situations in detail. The final chapter draws general conclusions about what kinds of words tend to get borrowed, what kinds of word meanings are particularly resistant to borrowing, and what kinds of social contact situations lead to what kinds of borrowing situations.