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  • Cologne research group deciphers enigmatic script from antiquity

    Much of what is known today about the Kushan Empire and its inhabitants comes from Chinese, Greek or Roman sources. Until now, no one has been able to read some of the written testimonies of this Central Asian culture, because the writing system in which they were written had not been deciphered. The Cologne linguists Svenja Bonmann, Jakob Halfmann and Natalie Korobzow have now made a breakthrough: the riddle of the unknown Kushana script has been solved.  

  • The German Research Foundation (DFG) has granted Professor Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, General Linguistics, a Reinhart Koselleck Project

    Entitled "Taking Spoken Language Seriously / Gesprochene Sprache ernst nehmen," the project will address the question of the relevance of spoken language properties for grammatical analysis over a period of five years. The funding amount is one million euros. Reinhart Kosseleck projects are awarded exclusively to researchers whose curriculum vitae is distinguished by outstanding scientific achievements. Funding is provided for particularly innovative and, in a positive sense, risk-taking research.
    Congratulations!
     
  • The Acquisition Sketch Project

    The Acquisition Sketch Project is an initiative aimed at expanding knowledge about the acquisition of little-studied languages. Combining findings from child language acquisition and language documentation, the project provides a detailed description of how to collect data and write an "acquisition sketch" of a language based on just 5 hours of naturalistic data.
     
  • Indogermanische Gesellschaft: Prizes for the best theses

    Since 2011, the Indo-European Society has awarded annual prizes for the best final theses in Indo-European studies worldwide. For the year 2022, Svenja Bonmann won 2nd place with her dissertation Parametric Syntactic Reconstruction. Noun Phrases in Iranian, Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Indo-European (Supervision: Eugen Hill, Daniel Kölligan & Agnes Korn). Leo Rennert's master's thesis Die pronominalen Endungen der germanischen Adjektivflexion: Althochdeutsch (Supervision: Eugen Hill) received 3rd place. We congratulate both of them very much!
     
  • Wilhelm von Humboldt Award to Maria Bardají

    During this year's annual conference, Maria Bardají i Farré was awarded the Wilhelm von Humboldt Award for Young Academics of the German Linguistic Society. This is the most important award for young linguists in the German-speaking world. Congratulations!
     
  • Prof. Himmelmann as guest on the podcast Theory Neutral

    In the January 08, 2023 episode, Prof. Himmelmann talks about discursive demonstrative functions and his article "Demonstratives in Narrative Discourse: A Taxonomy of Universal Uses" (1996).

    News Archive of General and Historical Comparative Linguistics

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