• PhD position: Transcription practices

  We invite applications for a PhD position within the DFG (German Research Foundation) project ‘Taking spoken language seriously’. The project investigates the extent to which the characteristics of spoken language, as opposed to those of written language, are relevant in typological and theoretical research. The deadline for applications is 31.07.2024; see here for details.

• "The two presents of Romani: historical and typological investigations"

  On 2 July 2024, Andrea Scala (University of Milan) will give a talk on "The two presents of Romani: historical and typological investigations". The abstract of the talk can be found here. The talk will take place at 4 pm at the Department of Linguistics in Meister-Ekkehart- Str. 7 (2nd floor, seminar room on the right). You are cordially invited!

• Lunch & Linguistics in summer term 2024

  On April 16, 2024, the CCLS Lunch & Linguistics lecture series will start, where young researchers (from advanced Master and PhD students to post-docs) can present and discuss their research projects and network with researchers from different fields of linguistics. You are very welcome to participate! Click here for further information.

• CCLS Lecture Series in summer term 2024

  The lecture series of the Cologne Center of Language Sciences (CCLS) starts on April 15, 2024. This semester there will again be many interesting lectures on different research fields of linguistics. Here you can find the program of the CCLS Lecture Series in the summer term 2024 as well as further information.

• Research team from Cologne University deciphers curious enigmatic writing from antiquity

  Much of what is known today about the Kushana empire and its inhabitants comes from Chinese, Greek or Roman sources. Until now, no one has been able to read some of the written records of this Central Asian culture, as the writing system in which they were written had not been deciphered. The Cologne linguists Svenja Bonmann, Jakob Halfmann and Natalie Korobzow have now achieved a breakthrough: the mystery of the unknown Kushana script has been solved.  
  The Cologne University Magazine also reports on this. 

• Maria Bardají i Farré as guest of Radio Republik Indonesia Tolitoli

  At an interactive dialogue titled "TANTANGAN DAN UPAYA PELESTARIAN BAHASA DAERAH" (Challenges and efforts for the preservation of regional languages), Maria Bardají i Farré spoke about the Western Austronesian language Totoli on July 26, 2023.  

• 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.

News Archive of General and Historical Comparative Linguistics

• Halfmann, Jakob, Svenja Bonmann, Simon Fries & Natalie Korobzow. 2024. A New Reading of the Bactrian Part of the Dašt-i Nāwur Trilingual (DN I), Indo-Iranian Journal 67 (1), 5-51. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/15728536-06701005
• Fries, Simon & Svenja Bonmann. 2023. The Development of Arin kul ‘water’ ~ Kott ûl, Ket ¹u·l’, Yugh ¹ur and Its Typological Background. International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics 5(2), 183-198. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/25898833-20230044
• Fries, Simon, Jakob Halfmann, Eugen Hill & Denise Hübner. 2023. From noun to future tense. The functional diachrony of the l-future in the Nuristani languages and its typological background. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung (STUF) 76(1), 53-85. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/stuf-2023-2002
• Bonmann, Svenja, Jakob Halfmann, Natalie Korobzow & Bobomullo Bobomulloev. 2023. A Partial Decipherment of the Unknown Kushan Script. Transactions of the Philological Society 121(2). 293–329.
• Coenen, Pascal. 2023. A New Interpretation of the Vedic Particle aṅgá. Bhasha. Journal of South Asian Linguistics, Philology and Grammatical Traditions 2(1). 143–220.
• Fries, Simon. 2023. On the origin of Greek first person singular optatives in -οιμι, their relation to Church Slavonic optatives in -ěmь, and the original function of primary and secondary endings in Proto-Indo-European. Die Sprache 55. 95–152.
• Fries, Simon. 2023[2021]. Why and How Do New Tense Formations Arise? – On the Emergence of the Vedic So-Called Periphrastic tā́-Future. Historische Sprachforschung 134. 96–165.
• Bonmann, Svenja, Simon Fries, Natalie Korobzow, Laura Günther & Eugen Hill. 2023. Towards a New Reconstruction of the Proto-Yeniseian Sound System. Part I: Word-Initial Consonants. International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics 5. 39–82.
• Bonmann, Svenja. 2022. Word-internal "thorn"-clusters and the dative singular of the PIE 1st person pronoun, Historische Sprachforschung 135(1), 43-74.