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File containing one row per ISO 639-3 language, with metadata and data on word length, including mean word length for each of the 100 items in the Swadesh list and word length averaged over the 40 ASJP items. File containing a WALS code, a continuous word length value and a corresponding categorical value for each of the languages already in WALS.

The global biomass demand for food and fodder as well as for energy production will continuously increase in the near future, leading to increasing pressure on land use. For example, agriculture and forestry on drained peatlands will substantially change the physical, biological and chemical soil properties and results in peat degradation, accompanied by huge emissions of greenhouse gases. Peatlands cover an estimated area of ca. 400 million ha, equivalent to 3 % of the Earth’s land surface [23]. According FAO only 15 % percent of peatlands are drained and used for agriculture, grazing, peat mining and forestry, especially for bioenergy plantations, but causing almost 6 percent of total anthropogenic CO2 emissions and almost 25 percent of the GHG emissions from the entire land use [10]. Since November 2018, HTW in collaboration with Greifswald University started a new and innovative research project, studying the production of biomass on wet peatland sites and the optimization of the thermal utilization of such biomass sources in small and medium scale applications, e.g. household systems and centralized heating plants for communities. The project is therefore focused on an alternative opportunity of using peatlands for bioenergy production, avoiding soil degradation and reducing fossil fuel based GHG emissions by replacing such fuels. Several peat forming plant species such as Common Reed, Reed Canary Grass Sedge species can be produced on rewetted peatlands. Common Reed (Phragmites australis) e.g. grows rapidly and the annual yields will reach under Central European conditions between 3.6 up to 43 t dry matter per ha and year (depending on water level, nutrient availability and pH values) [31]. The heating value of reed (17.7 MJ/kg) e.g. is remarkable and comparable with Miscanthus. Modified conventional agricultural technologies are suitable to harvest, compact, transport and store the reed and well established conversion technologies as e. g. boiler technologies for straw can be used for the utilization of the reed biomass. The presentation and the respective publication of the related paper will introduce the first results of this research project, including the results of measuring campaigns, carried out at a 800 kW heating plant for community heating in Malchin (Mecklenburg Western Pomerania) during February/March 2019. В ближайшем будущем мировой спрос на биомассу для призводства продуктов питания и корма, а также энергии будет непрерывно расти, что приведет к увеличению нагрузки на землепользование. Например, сельское и лесное хозяйство на осушенных торфяниках существенно изменит физические, биологические и химические свойства почвы и приведет к деградации торфа, сопровождаемой огромными выбросами парниковых газов. Торфяные угодья занимают около 400 млн га, что эквивалентно 3 % поверхности Земли [23]. По данным ФАО, только 15 % торфяников осушаются и используются для сельского и лесного хозяйства, выпаса скота, добычи торфа и особенно в качестве биоэнергетических плантаций. В результате этой деятельности количество выбросов составляет 6 % от общих антропогенных (CO2) и почти 25 % выбросов ПГ от землепользования [10]. С ноября 2018 г. HTW в сотрудничестве с Университетом Грайфсвальда начал новый инновационный исследовательский проект, посвященный изучению производства биомассы на заболоченных торфяниках и оптимизации термического использования источников биомассы в малых и средних проектах: бытовых системах и централизованных отопительных установках. Проект сфокусирован на альтернативной возможности использования торфяников для производства биоэнергии, предотвращения деградации почвы и сокращения выбросов парниковых газов на основе замены ископаемого топлива. На повторно заболоченных торфяниках можно выращивать несколько видов таких торфообразующих растений, как обыкновенный тростник, канареечник тростниковидный или осока. Тростник обыкновенный (Phragmites australis) быстро растет, а ежегодный урожай в среднеевропейских условиях может достигать от 3,6 до 43 т сухого вещества на гектар в год (в зависимости от уровня воды, наличия питательных веществ и значений pH) [31]. Теплотворная способность тростника (17,7 МДж/кг), например, сопоставима с мискантусом. Модифицированные традиционные сельскохозяйственные технологии подходят для сбора, уплотнения, транспортировки и хранения тростника. Хорошо зарекомендовавших себя технологии переработки, например, теплотехнику для соломы можно использовать для утилизации тростниковой биомассы. В отчете и соответствующих актах представлены итоги исследовательского проекта, включая результаты замеров, проведенных на теплоцентрали мощностью 800 кВт коммунального отопления в Мальхин (Мекленбург, Западная Померания), в феврале и марте 2019 г.

International audience; Classifiers and noun class markers are often semantically general and semantically opaque compared to open-class nouns, and in this sense they constitute a semantic reduction of the noun universe. These two semantic characteristics also play important roles in the diachronic development of nominal classification systems. First, the need for semantically general forms for anaphoric reference may be a possible motivation for developing nominal classification in the first place. Second, opaque classification, which may, for example, emerge through coales-cence of classes with homophonous markers, may be replaced by transparent classification because of the incompatibility of opaque classification and certain syntactic constructions, such as contrastive focus. Finally, opaque classification, typical of grammatical gender systems, is less likely to diffuse through language contact than transparent classification, which is typical for other types of systems , including numeral classifier systems.

Sphagnum farming - the production of Sphagnum biomass on rewetted bogs - helps towards achieving global climate goals by halting greenhouse gas emissions from drained peat and by replacing peat with a renewable biomass alternative. Large-scale implementation of Sphagnum farming requires a wide range of know-how, from initial species selection up to the final production and use of Sphagnum biomass based growing media in horticulture. This article provides an overview of relevant knowledge accumulated over the last 15 years and identifies open questions.

© 2017 by The University of New Mexico. All rights reserved. This paper employs a quantitative analysis of lexical data to generate a tree describing the historical relationships among Iroquoian languages. An alternative to glottochronology is used to estimate the timing of branching events within the tree. We estimate the homeland of the language family using lexical and geographic distance measures and then compare this estimate with homeland determinations in the literature. Our results suggest that Proto-Iroquoian dates to around 2624 bc, and that the Finge r Lakes region of west-central New York is the most likely homeland. The results also revealed a strong relationship between linguistic dissimilarity and geographic distance, likely reflecting the isolating effects of spatial separation on the magnitude of linguistic exchange. The timing of language divergences seems to coincide with important events observable in the archaeological record, including the first evidence for the use of corn in New York and Ontario. The development of important Iroquoian cultural attributes such as the longhouse, matrilocal residence, and the intensification of agriculture all coincide with a period which saw most of the internal language divergences.

© 2017 The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the Society of Systematic Biologists. All rights reserved. Since the early 1970s, biologists have debated whether evolution is punctuated by speciation events with bursts of cladogenetic changes, or whether evolution tends to be of a more gradual, anagenetic nature. A similar discussion among linguists has barely begun, but the present results suggest that there is also room for controversy over this issue in linguistics. The only previous study correlated the number of nodes in linguistic phylogenies with branch lengths and found support for punctuated equilibrium. We replicate this result for branch lengths, but find no support for punctuated equilibrium using a different, automated measure of linguistic divergence and a much larger data set. With the automated measure, segments of trees containing more nodes show no greater divergence from an outgroup than segments containing fewer nodes.

It is widely assumed that one of the fundamental properties of spoken language is the arbitrary relation between sound and meaning. Some exceptions in the form of nonarbitrary associations have been documented in linguistics, cognitive science, and anthropology, but these studies only involved small subsets of the 6,000+ languages spoken in the world today. By analyzing word lists covering nearly two-thirds of the world's languages, we demonstrate that a considerable proportion of 100 basic vocabulary items carry strong associations with specific kinds of human speech sounds, occurring persistently across continents and linguistic lineages (linguistic families or isolates). Prominently among these relations, we find property words ("small" and i, "full" and p or b) and body part terms ("tongue" and l, "nose" and n). The areal and historical distribution of these associations suggests that they often emerge independently rather than being inherited or borrowed. Our results therefore have important implications for the language sciences, given that nonarbitrary associations have been proposed to play a critical role in the emergence of cross-modal mappings, the acquisition of language, and the evolution of our species' unique communication system.

© 2014 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. The comparative method of historical linguistics is carefully applied to the hypothesis that Chitimacha, a language of southern Louisiana now without fully fluent speakers, and languages of the Totozoquean family of Mesoamerica are genealogically related. Ninety-one lexical sets comparing Chitimacha words collected by Swadesh (1939; 1946a; 1950) to words reconstructed for Proto-Totozoquean (Brown et al. 2011) show regular sound correspondences. Along with certain structural similarities, this evidence attests to the descent of these languages from a common ancestor, Proto-Chitimacha-Totozoquean. By identifying regular sound correspondences, the phonological inventory and some of the vocabulary of the proto-language are reconstructed. Reconstructed words relating to maize agriculture and the fabrication of paper indicate that prehistoric Chitimacha speakers migrated to the Lower Mississippi Valley from Mesoamerica. Some speculations on how and when Chitimacha speakers migrated are offered.

This study addresses the question whether the borrowability of linguistic forms, in particular affixes, is constrained by structural properties of the donor and recipient languages involved. According to some claims, structural similarity favors affix borrowing. On some accounts, structural compatibility of a certain kind is even a precondition for affix borrowing. This study tests these claims using data from a set of 78 languages that borrowed between one and 50 affixes, taken from the AfBo database (Seifart, 2013a). The extent of affix borrowing in this set of languages is compared with structural similarity scores for the donor and recipient languages involved, obtained from morphosyntactic features provided in the World Atlas of Language Structures (Dryer and Haspelmath, 2011). Results suggest that structural similarity between a (potential) donor and recipient language plays at best a minor role in determining the extent of affix borrowing. This supports the view that bilingual speakers are not—at least not strongly—constrained by structural factors of the languages they speak when creating mixed varieties of these languages, resulting in contact-induced language change.

Contains fulltext : 94255-OA.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) 35 p.

The article's primary concern is to address the usage of The world atlas of language structures through comparing it with another typological database of similar scope, Jazyki mira. Such a comparison is carried out based on a set of criteria. First, the scope of the databases is compared, as well as their differences and similarities in structure, in the number of errors, and in the existing user interfaces. Then calculations of typological similarity and temporal stability of language features based on the data provided by both databases are compared. Finally, conclusions are drawn as to the relative efficiency and usefulness of these databases for different aims of research or educational goals. © Walter de Gruyter.