Abbreviations

For more information about the lecture halls and seminar rooms, see our lecture room page. The names listed under "Technical Assistance" are student volunteers who will act as a contact person for technical questions of the lecturers and workshop speakers during the course or workshop.

Bioinformatic methods in calculating language relationships

This course deals with the computation of language trees and networks using methods from bioinformatics. Since the first language tree published by Schleicher in 1853, relationships between languages have been viewed as similar to relationships between species. Although there have been many debates about the adequateness of "genetic" language trees, the genetic metaphor is on the rise in theoretical historical linguistics. Bioinformatics methods, originally designed for the comparison of DNA and genomes, are nowadays often used to construct language trees. In this course, we start with a short introduction into DNA sequence analysis and bioinformatics in general. We highlight the differences and similarities between analyzing biological sequences and analyzing human language. Important algorithms for computing similarity (of sequences, words, sentences, languages, etc.) are explained. We then turn to phylogenetic algorithms for trees, such as hierarchical clustering and maximum parsimony. Finally, we give an outlook on algorithms for infering phylogenies that are not trees. These are particularly important for historical linguistics given the large degree to which languages influence each other beyond their genetic relationships. For each problem, we introduce the required data, the algorithms, and different methods to assess the quality of the results.