Category: Languages
2026
21 Aug: Food of the world: Three Sisters stew
Recipe for “Languages of the
Americas” As part of the “Food of
the World” segment in my “Languages of the
World” course at NTU Singapore, I’ve been
cooking food from a region of the world th..
(more)
11 Aug: Gaussian Process for Areal controls in linguistic typology
This is a blog post that I’ve had in mind
for awhile, and as I was working on it I
realized that there is a bit of groundwork
needed. Part of that groundwork was laid in
a previous post where I showe.. (more)
05 Aug: Food of the world: Uzbek Plov
Recipe for “Languages of Central
Asia” As part of the “Food of the
World” segment in my “Languages of the
World” course at NTU Singapore, I have been
cooking food from the part of the world ..
(more)
28 Jul: Determining language areas in linguistic typology
In a previous post I showed a simple way to
control for language family and area with
categorical variables in a linear mixed
model using Python. In a more recent post I
showed how we can plot langua.. (more)
22 Jul: Food of the world: Chakalaka
Recipe for “Languages of
Africa” As part of the “Food of the
World” segment in my “Languages of the
World” course at NTU Singapore, I cook food
from a region of the world that we’re
discussi.. (more)
14 Jul: Maps from the taggedPBC: a Python tutorial
Linguistic maps When
working with languages, it is important to
keep in mind the context in which they
exist. While “context” has many different
facets, a primary aspect is geography.
Geogra.. (more)
01 Jul: Food of the world: Koprová Omáčka
Recipe for “Languages of
Europe” This week’s post is a
recipe from Europe. As part of the “Food of
the World” segment in my “Languages of the
World” course at NTU Singapore, I cook food
from a l.. (more)
15 Jun: Food of the world: Kaima Bona Gatoi
I’ve been on holiday and so missed posting a
blog for last week, but this week I again
have a post about food. As part of the “Food
of the World” segment in my “Languages of
the World” course at .. (more)
02 Jun: Contributing to the taggedPBC
If you’ve followed my blog for any length of
time, you probably know that I’m interested
in languages of the world. The incredible
diversity in linguistic structures found in
the roughly 7,000 wo.. (more)
26 May: Food of the world: Nasi Lemak
Recipe for “Austronesian
Languages” This week’s post is a
recipe from the insular south-east Asian
region of the world. As part of the “Food of
the World” segment in my “Languages of the
World.. (more)
12 May: Food of the world: South Indian Dal
Recipe for “Languages of South
Asia” As part of my series on “Food
of the World”, I’ve been writing up the
recipes for food I cook for my “Languages of
the World” course at NTU Singapore. It.. (more)
05 May: Data annotation for low-resource NLP
Data annotation for low-resource
NLP It’s that time of the semester
where I’m in the throes of assessing student
work for classes and trying to submit
grades. One of my tasks has recently in.. (more)
29 Apr: Food of the world: Ainu soup
Recipe for “Languages of SE and E
Asia” As part of my series on “Food
of the World”, I’ve been writing up the
recipes for food I cook for my “Languages of
the World” course at NTU Singapore… (more)
20 Apr: Romanization of scripts and NLP resources
Romanization of scripts and NLP
resources !Language scripts (from
Freepik )
When I began developing the taggedPBC I needed to represent all of the roughly 2,000 languages in a similar wa.. (more)
When I began developing the taggedPBC I needed to represent all of the roughly 2,000 languages in a similar wa.. (more)
15 Apr: Food of the world: Jollof Rice
Recipe for “Pidgins and Creoles”:
Jollof Rice As I noted in a
previous post, food is part and parcel of
any fieldwork experience. My “Languages of
the World” course at NTU Singapore gives
an.. (more)
30 Mar: Fieldwork and Food
Food in Languages of the
World The diversity of the world’s
languages is driven by a number of factors
that are still not well understood. However,
there is clearly some influence from
environ.. (more)
24 Mar: Git sparse checkout
I sometimes find myself wanting to work on a
project involving data or code from Github.
Many such repositories are quite small and
easy to work with, containing mostly text
files. Occasionally, howe.. (more)
17 Mar: Controlling for Descent and Area in linguistic typology
When conducting comparative studies on
linguistic features, we are essentially
observing patterns. In a previous post I
mentioned one problem we need to deal with,
related to how we represent the fea.. (more)
10 Mar: Comparative data and localization
When working with actual language data, one
major concern is how to represent that data.
Many times as researchers the things we want
to compare are not equivalent, so we must
use the best approximat.. (more)
23 Feb: Austroasiatic linguistics YouTube channel
Most of my fieldwork research on minority
languages has been conducted within the
Austroasiatic (AA) family. This is a group
of languages spoken by diverse peoples
across South & Southeast Asia, and .. (more)
09 Feb: Use (AI) agents or get left behind? A response
A couple of weeks ago I read a post by Tim
Dettmers outlining how he has tried to use
AI to automate various tasks, with some
examples of successes and failures. While
his attempt to automate email w.. (more)
02 Feb: Word order from corpora: the taggedPBC (new paper)
My interest in languages has led to some
interesting places, working on languages
from different families in various contexts.
Most recently I’ve been curious about the
ways that languages develop ov.. (more)
26 Jan: Low-resource language processing (lessons from HG2051)
Since 2023 I’ve been teaching a course on
natural language processing at NTU
Singapore. The goal is for students to learn
basic Python programming skills that allow
them to work with language data. T.. (more)
2025
22 May: The taggedPBC - a massive dataset for crosslinguistic investigations
About a year ago I was looking for annotated
texts to investigate some questions I had
about word order. My main question was
whether it was possible to extract word
order from corpora, but I realize.. (more)
2019
16 Sep: Computer-assisted syntactic reconstruction
Things have been quite busy over the last
year or so, when I last posted. My wife and
I moved to Zurich with our 4-month old, I
helped organize a workshop on word order
here at UZH, a proceedings volu.. (more)
12 Sep: ICAAL 7 Proceedings volume
!Picture Planting rice near Jowai, NE India
At the end of last year the ICAAL 7
proceedings volume was published by
University of Hawai’i Press as a special
issue of the Journal of the South-East A..
(more)
2018
24 Jul: Fieldwork in Myanmar
I just returned from fieldwork in Myanmar,
where we spent several days training staff
and students at two different universities
(Mandalay University and Yangon University
of Foreign Languages) in fie.. (more)
21 Feb: Moving to Zurich
The last post was a bit of a brain dump to
make sure I didn’t forget a few lessons I
learned, in part because I knew I was
quitting the job that involved doing ML type
things. While I was working t.. (more)
2017
03 Dec: Neural Networks: Some lessons from text classification
I have been quite lax with posting here
mainly because I have been working very hard
on a difficult problem. My current job
involves (among other things) trying to
automate a psychological coding s.. (more)
18 Aug: Open Science, Data, and Linguistics
One of the concerns that has occupied my
mind for that past few years is the question
of data accessibility in the field of
Linguistics. I am happy to announce that the
data that underpins my gramm.. (more)
06 May: Analyze tone and plot: A Praat script for exploring, analyzing, and visualizing or plotting F0 (pitch) tracks
Along the lines of some of my previous
posts on tools for linguistic analysis, I
thought I’d post a quick update on a Praat
script I’ve been working on. While not part
of the series of posts I.. (more)
26 Mar: Praat and scripts: an introduction
In this third post about linguistic tools,
I’ll be discussing software that I use for
acoustic analysis. Praat is one of the
premier acoustic analysis tools available
for computers. While there are pr.. (more)
05 Mar: Linguistic Tools (Mac/PC)
When I started my PhD program in Linguistics
(language documentation and description), I
had some experience with linguistic
analysis, but not to the degree that I had
to learn in order to complete my.. (more)
2014
29 Jul: Deictic Demonstratives (Contd.)
!Pnar deictic demonstratives In my last
post I discussed the concept of deixis and
illustrated deictic demonstratives in Pnar.
Pnar’s deictic demonstrative system combines
gender clitics with large.. (more)
26 Jul: Deictic Demonstratives
At the Himalayan Languages Symposium last
week I gave a talk about deixis. This
grammatical feature is essentially
‘pointing’, and words or morphemes in
language can point to various things, so
gramma.. (more)
23 Jul: Andaman Languages
!Picture I mentioned that Dr. Anvita Abbi
gave a great talk at the Himalayan Languages
Symposium on her work on Great Andaman in
the Indian Ocean. Here’s a map just to show
you where that is. .. (more)
18 Jul: Himalayan Languages Symposium
Yesterday afternoon I gave a talk at the
Himalayan Languages Symposium, which was
held this year at NTU. It’s the 20th
meeting, and has generally focused on
languages of the Himalayan region, which
is.. (more)
2013
31 May: Bangkok SEALS
I’ve been in Bangkok for the last few days,
attending the SouthEast Asian Linguistics
Society conference here at Chulalongkorn
University. The campus is in the center of
Bangkok and rather easy to get.. (more)