Welcome to the section of Historical Comparative Linguistics!
CCLS Lecture Series
On 04.05. the CCLS Lecture Series starts with exciting presentations from various linguistic disciplines.
ZEIT Article: “Verstummt und vergessen”
Article about endangered languages and interview with Birgit Hellwig in ZEIT Nr. 08/2026.
Kushan script featured in Terra X
A media tip for anyone following the discoveries surrounding the Kushan script: in this episode of Terra X on ZDF, Svenja Bonmann and her colleagues report on their deciphering of this script (from approx. minute 17:19). They then head to a mountain range in Tajikistan to recover and evaluate further characters carved into rocks. They are accompanied by a Tajik archaeologist and local civil protection authorities. Watch it on 1 March at 7:30 p.m. on ZDF and now in the media library (in German).
Presentation: Vereinbarkeit von generativer KI und Lehre
Elen Le Foll and Eva Scheel-Huber gave a presentation on the compatibility of generative AI and teaching on February 4, 2026, as part of the UzK Competence Days “KI in der Hochschulbildung.”
EU-financed project on „Conversational Storytelling“
On November 1st 2025, “STORYTEL - At the roots of multimodality: Learning from smartphone-based audiovisual recordings of conversational storytelling”, will launch. This three year Erasmus+ project is coordinated by the University of Cologne and involves the University of Bologna, the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and the University of Murcia. The scientific and administrative team in Cologne includes: Anna Bonifazi (project manager, IfL DL), Sonja Gipper (IfL ASW), Martine Grice (IfL Phonetik), Sandra Debreslioska (IfL DL), Juman Al-qaoud (IfL DL), Madeleine Frings (IfL DL), Felix Rau (DCH), Øyvind Eide (IHD), Lüder Schmidt (FG1) and Nina Kind (D7).
Millions in funding for research into indigenous languagest
The Volkswagen Foundation is funding a project by Dr. Svenja Bonmann to analyse an unknown Central American writing system and attempt to assign it to a language / Approximately one million euros in funding over three years.
Kleine Fächer im Portrait: Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
Sonja Gipper and Birgit Hellwig introduce the subject of "General Linguistics" in a new blog post from kleinefaecher.de.
News Archive of General and Historical Comparative Linguistics
- Bonmann, Svenja. 2026. The Comparative Method and Syntactic Reconstruction. International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 3rd Edition, Ed. by H. Nesi and P. Milin. Elsevier. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-323-95504-1.01296-5.
- Coenen, Pascal. 2025. Non-canonical quantification in Old Persian: The adverb vasai̯. Folia Linguistica 59(3). 581–632. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/flin-2024-2039.
- Bonmann, Svenja and Simon Fries. 2025. Linguistic evidence suggests that Xiōng-nú and Huns spoke the same Paleo-Siberian language. Transactions of the Philological Society.
- Fries, Simon, Svenja Bonmann, Jakob Halfmann & Natalie Korobzow. 2025. Observations on Lines 1–3 of the Gāndhārī Part of the Dašt-i Nāwur Trilingual (DN IV). Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 175(1). 137–161.
- Coenen, Pascal. 2025 [2023]. Rigvedic báḍ: A presentative particle. Historische Sprachforschung, 136, 21-50.
- Casaretto, Antje. 2024. Secondary predicates and motion events: the rise of complex predicates in Vedic Sanskrit. Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 11(1–2), 43–63.
- Bonmann, Svenja. 2024. Zum Ursprung des sog. ā-Konjunktivs des Latino-Faliskischen, Sabellischen und Venetischen. Glotta. Zeitschrift für griechische und lateinische Sprache 100(2), 246–287.
- Suter, Edgar 2024. Benefactive constructions: A comparative study of the Huon Peninsula languages. Language and Linguistics in Melanesia 42. 128–202.
- Hill, Eugen, Simon Fries, Natalie Korobzow, Laura Günther & Svenja Bonmann. 2024. Towards a New Reconstruction of the Proto‑Yeniseian Sound System. Part II: Word‑Final Consonants. International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics 6(2), 216–293.
- Wiemer, Björn, Eugen Hill, Daniel Kölligan & Jan-Niklas Linnemeier. 2024. Between the birth and death of future tenses. Related languages as a natural lab for research into grammatical change (LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 58). München: LINCOM EUROPA.
- Fries, Simon and Natalie Korobzow. 2024. On the dating of sound changes and its implications for language relationship. The case of Proto-Yeniseian *p- > Ket h-, Yugh f-. Diachronica 41(4). 525–555. (Online first).