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Author: search.filters.author.Damián E. BlasíHas files: No

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    Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss
    (Center for Open Science, 2022-12-04)
    While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2,400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank allows us to quantify the relative effects of genealogical inheritance and geographic proximity on the structural diversity of the world's languages, evaluate constraints on linguistic diversity, and identify the world's most unusual languages. An analysis of the consequences of language loss reveals that the reduction in diversity will be strikingly uneven across the major linguistic regions of the world. Without sustained efforts to document and revitalize endangered languages, our linguistic window into human history, cognition and culture will be seriously fragmented.
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    Grambank Reveals the Importance of Genealogical Constraints on Linguistic Diversity and Highlights the Impact of Language Loss
    (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2023-04-21)
    While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here, we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank allows us to quantify the relative effects of genealogical inheritance and geographic proximity on the structural diversity of the world’s languages, evaluate constraints on linguistic diversity, and identify the world’s most unusual languages. An analysis of the consequences of language loss reveals that the reduction in diversity will be strikingly uneven across the major linguistic regions of the world. Without sustained efforts to document and revitalize endangered languages, our linguistic window into human history, cognition, and culture will be seriously fragmented.
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    Decimal systems around the world
    (Royal Society, 2025-10-20)
    Decimal numeral systems (base-10) are the most widespread type of counting system across the world's languages. Their ubiquity has often been attributed to presumed functional advantages, including ease of use, cognitive efficiency and arithmetical transparency. In principle, decimal systems represent numbers as compositions involving a form representing 10 and smaller atomic numerals (e.g. Mandarin shí sān 'thirteen', literally 'ten three'). In practice, however, many languages exhibit deviations that obscure this compositional logic—such as allomorphy ( fifteen in English, as opposed to five-ten ), suppletion (e.g. Russian sorok 'forty', unrelated to četyre 'four' or desjat' 'ten'), or secondary structures involving other compositional elements (e.g. 5). Despite being frequently mentioned in the literature, these violations have not been systematically analysed at scale. Here, we develop a rule-based classification of decimal systems and apply it to a curated, genealogically and geographically balanced sample of 118 languages. We assess each system along three dimensions— transparency , canonicity and compositionality —and show that, while surface-level irregularities are widespread, the underlying mathematical structure of decimal systems remains highly regular and patterned. These results reveal that deviations from perfect decimality are not random but instead reflect structured variation shaped by historical, cognitive and typological constraints. This article is part of the theme issue 'A solid base for scaling up: the structure of numeration systems'.
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