Turkey, Shmurkey! — A Response to Das et al. (2016)

Jun 10, 2016 by

Turkey, Shmurkey! — A Response to Das et al. (2016)

As promised in an earlier post, I am presenting here an informal response to the article, published recently in Genome Biology and Evolution by Paul Wexler, Eran Elhaik and colleagues (henceforth, Das et al. 2016). To summarize my...

read more

Is Yiddish to Be Traced to Turkey?

Apr 29, 2016 by

Is Yiddish to Be Traced to Turkey?

[Thanks to Leni Silberman for originally drawing my attention to one of the media reports, and to Antonia Cavendish, Maria Soukhanova, Anna Dybo, Peter Shalen, Razib Khan, and Martin Lewis for helpful discussions.]   In the past few...

read more

Why Did Yiddish Survive in Eastern Europe (for as Long as It Did)?

Nov 23, 2015 by

Why Did Yiddish Survive in Eastern Europe (for as Long as It Did)?

[Thanks to Martin Lewis, Michael Nosonovsky, Katya Shilova, and Elena Zusmanovich for insightful conversations that led to certain points in this post.]   In his essay “Yiddish? Why Don’t We Speak Judeo-French?”, George Jochnowitz...

read more

Are Indo-Europeans “Untraceable”?—A Response to Jean-Paul Demoule...

Oct 25, 2015 by

Are Indo-Europeans “Untraceable”?—A Response to Jean-Paul Demoule

[Thanks to LanguagesOfTheWorld reader, Arjan, who drew my attention to the article discussed here.]   In a recent interview titled “Indo-Europeans, the untraceable people that racist fantasies are obsessed with”*, published in a...

read more

Using Grammar to Identify Language Relatedness

Oct 22, 2015 by

Using Grammar to Identify Language Relatedness

[Note: This post is aimed mostly at my current students, but comments from other readers are welcome as well. It is in a way a “prequel” to the mini-series, starting here.]   Most textbook that discuss language families and how such...

read more

Reconstructing the Lifestyles of Three Pre-Historic Amazonian Tribes

Oct 7, 2015 by

Reconstructing the Lifestyles of Three Pre-Historic Amazonian Tribes

[Note: this post is aimed mostly at the students in my current class, “The Science of the Deep Human Past: Linguistics, Genetics and Archeology”, but comments from other readers are very welcome as well. The post draws heavily on...

read more