Lects in Helsinki Finnish - a probabilistic component modeling approach

This article examines Finnish lects spoken in Helsinki from the 1970s to the 2010s with a probabilistic model called Latent Dirichlet Allocation. The model searches for underlying components based on the linguistic features used in the interviews. Several coherent lects were discovered as components in the data, which counters the results of previous studies that report only weak co-variation between features that are assumed to present the same lect. The speakers, however, are not categorical in their linguistic behavior and tend to use more than one lect in their speech. This implies that the lects should not be considered in parallel with seemingly uniform linguistic systems such as languages, but as partial systems that constitute a network.Peer reviewe

Linguistic Change and Biological Evolution

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Katomuotojen eteneminen yleiskielen hd-yhtymässä Helsingin puhekielessä

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Crouching TIGER, hidden structure: Exploring the nature of linguistic data using TIGER values

In recent years, techniques such as Bayesian inference of phylogeny have become a standard part of the quantitative linguistic toolkit. While these tools successfully model the tree-like component of a linguistic dataset, real-world datasets generally include a combination of tree-like and nontree-like signals. Alongside developing techniques for modeling nontree-like data, an important requirement for future quantitative work is to build a principled understanding of this structural complexity of linguistic datasets. Some techniques exist for exploring the general structure of a linguistic dataset, such as NeighborNets, delta scores, and Q-residuals; however, these methods are not without limitations or drawbacks. In general, the question of what kinds of historical structure a linguistic dataset can contain and how these might be detected or measured remains critically underexplored from an objective, quantitative perspective. In this article, we propose TIGER values, a metric that estimates the internal consistency of a genetic dataset, as an additional metric for assessing how tree-like a linguistic dataset is. We use TIGER values to explore simulated language data ranging from very tree-like to completely unstructured, and also use them to analyze a cognate-coded basic vocabulary dataset of Uralic languages. As a point of comparison for the TIGER values, we also explore the same data using delta scores, Q-residuals, and NeighborNets. Our results suggest that TIGER values are capable of both ranking tree-like datasets according to their degree of treelikeness, as well as distinguishing datasets with tree-like structure from datasets with a nontree-like structure. Consequently, we argue that TIGER values serve as a useful metric for measuring the historical heterogeneity of datasets. Our results also highlight the complexities in measuring treelikeness from linguistic data, and how the metrics approach this question from different perspectives

Miksi kato leviää? hd-yhtymän katovariantin diffuusion syyt Helsingin puhekielessä

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Nimistöntutkija aikamatkalla

Arvioitu teos Jaakko Raunamaa: Finnic anthroponymy in the Middle Ages. Perspectives on pre- Christian and early Christian personal names. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Johdanto 94 s. ja viisi artikkelia 188 s. isbn 978-951-51-7653-0. Johdanto-osa saatavilla verkossa osoitteessa http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-51-7654-7

A Comparison of Naming Practices in Eastern and Western Finland in Late 16th Century

It is well known that there were clear differences between the naming practices in Eastern and Western Finland during the medieval / early modern period. However, studies have generally focussed on data from one of these regions, mainly in order to be able to do an in-depth analysis. This study aims to be explicitly comparative, by taking a set of names from each of these regions and looking at the similarities and differences between the two sets. In order to keep the two sets comparable, the data is taken from two tax registers in the third quarter of the 16th century, one in Upper Satakunta in western Finland in 1571 and another in Savonia Minor in eastern Finland in 1562–64. This is not altogether ideal, as it is clear that tax records had specific traditions with regard to how the names were recorded and thus the names do not fully reflect the practices in the overall community. Nevertheless, it can be seen that while the given names in both registers are quite similar, the bynames show clearly that the underlying name systems differ

A Comparison of Naming Practices in Eastern and Western Finland in Late 16th Century

It is well known that there were clear differences between the naming practices in Eastern and Western Finland during the medieval / early modern period. However, studies have generally focussed on data from one of these regions, mainly in order to be able to do an in-depth analysis. This study aims to be explicitly comparative, by taking a set of names from each of these regions and looking at the similarities and differences between the two sets. In order to keep the two sets comparable, the data is taken from two tax registers in the third quarter of the 16th century, one in Upper Satakunta in western Finland in 1571 and another in Savonia Minor in eastern Finland in 1562–64. This is not altogether ideal, as it is clear that tax records had specific traditions with regard to how the names were recorded and thus the names do not fully reflect the practices in the overall community. Nevertheless, it can be seen that while the given names in both registers are quite similar, the bynames show clearly that the underlying name systems differ

Mistä voi puhua, sitä voi hoitaa: Sukupuolen polyseemisyys transsukupuolisuuden hoitoa säätelemässä

acceptedVersionPeer reviewe