Evolutionary reconstruction of gender in Indo-European is a highly interesting field. The subject is a perfect testbed for how well evolutionary methods generally work. The core issue is that the system that we reconstruct to Proto-Indo-European, a system

I am taking up this blogg after a summer intermission. During the summer, I have been at International Conference of Historical Linguistics 24 in Canberra and at the 52nd Annual Meeting of Societas Linguistica Europea in Leipzig. In both places I talked a

The Swedish summer vacation is approaching, and I will go to Australia, among others to attend the International Conference on Historical Linguistics in Canberra, 1-5 July. I will give two talks, one about the evolution and tendencies of gender assignment

This blogpost will briefly introduce a highly interesting phenomenon in the history of Eurasian languages, namely the emergence of definiteness. Most ancient attested Indo-European languages do not have definitess marking, but the phenomenon appears relat

Of the 3672 entries of the Tocharian A dictionary (Carling and Pinault to appear), 772 lemma have been marked as “from Sanskrit”, which represents 21% of the entire vocabulary (of 1508 nouns, 338 are from Sanskrit, representing 22%). Of these 772 lemma, 3

During the period of the first centuries BCE, the impact of Iranian becomes important in Tocharian. This is something we know from the relatively large amounts of loanwords in Tocharian from various Iranian languages, beginning with one or several unknown

This week, also known as the Holy Week, is part of the holiday that in English goes by the name of Easter. Easter, which is celebrated throughout all of the Judaeo-Christian world, is one of the most important festivities of the year, marking the beginnin

In the previous blogpost, I started a compilation of safe loans from and into Tocharian. I will continue this work in the next post. In this post, I will talk about loan directionality, since I am currently completing a paper (with sev

Deixis refers to pointing by using language. Deixis seems to be universal – all languages have a system for denoting at least two dimensions of deixis: ‘here’ and ‘there’. Deixis is marked either by deictic markers without person reference ‘here’, ‘there’

The Takla Makan desert in Western China is in the middle of nowhere. Being there feels more like having landed on a deserted Tatooine than on earth; most villages are very scarcely populated and sand rocks, red desert sand, and dried salt rivers outdo the