Gerhard Jäger (Linguist)

Gerhard Jäger (born April 18, 1967 in Jena ) is a German linguist and university professor at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen . His main research interests include mathematically and statistically well-founded phylogenetic linguistics, which deals with the development of language families from their reconstructed beginnings to modern languages for the development of cross-family models. For this he and his working groups use agent-based modeling .

Live and act

After graduating from high school in Schmalkalden , Jäger began studying theoretical linguistics , German and logic at the universities of Leipzig and Düsseldorf from 1987 to 1992 . In 1992 he completed his studies in theoretical linguistics in Düsseldorf with a master’s degree. This was followed by doctoral studies from 1992 to 1995 in the "Structural Grammar Working Group" in the Max Planck Society in Berlin with Manfred Bierwisch , which Jäger completed in 1996 with his doctorate in philosophy from the Humboldt University in Berlin. During his doctoral phase, he went on to study from December 1995 to August 1997 as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Munich and from September 1997 to October 1998 also as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States of America . From November 1998 to October 2000 he was back at the Leibniz Center for General Linguistics in Berlin. In 2002 he completed his habilitation at the Humboldt University.

One area of research is comparative linguistics and the reconstruction of relationships between individual language families in time. Jäger investigated together with the paleoanthropologists Katerina Harvati and Hugo Reyes-Centeno . For their study, they examined 265 skull finds from Africa, Asia and Oceania as well as the vocabulary of over 800 languages and dialects from the regions mentioned. Among other things, the study was able to show that the linguistic relationship can primarily be associated with the morphology of the facial skull, the shape and shape of which was recorded quantitatively. Their thesis was that the average similarity between populations should decrease with geographic distance, both in terms of linguistic and biological characteristics. Furthermore, the thesis was put forward that populations with a linguistic similarity also tend to be similar in their biological characteristics. If these correlations also exist between populations that had divided more than 10,000 years ago and then developed differently, it could also prove that languages preserved historical features.

Fonts

Bibliography [5]
How bioinformatics helps to reconstruct the history of language. University of Tübingen Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Seminar for Linguistics ( [6] on sfs.uni-tuebingen.de)
The evolution of language families is shaped by the environment beyond neutral drift. Contained in Nature human behavior Vol. 2, November 5, 2018, No. 11, date: 11.2018: 816-821
Computational historical linguistics. University of Tübingen, Institute of Linguistics [7]
Lexicostats 2.0. In: Albrecht Plewnia, Andreas Witt (Ed.): Sprachverfall? Dynamics - change - variation. Yearbook of the Institute for the German Language 2013, De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2014, 978-3-11037-47-4-2, pp. 197-216. [8th]

literature

Johann-Mattis List : Theoretical and practical aspects of automatic sequence analysis in historical linguistics. April 15, 2010 ( [9] on lingulist.de)
Johann-Mattis List: Theoretical and practical aspects of quantitative historical linguistics. Research Center for the German Language Atlas, Philipps University of Marburg, summer semester 2013 ( [10] on academia.edu)
Johann-Mattis List: A new method for the automatic identification of etymologically related words. Institute for Romance Studies II, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf July 1 ( [11] on uni-ulm.de)

Web links

Gerhard Jäger: How bioinformatics helps to reconstruct the history of language. Tübingen, November 24, 2011 ( [12] on www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de)
Gerhard Jäger: Phylogenetic Methods in Historical Linguistics. The IELex database Maximum Likelihoold and Bayesian Inference . Forum Scientiarum, December 16, 2014 [13]
Photograph by Gerhard Jäger [14]

Individual evidence

↑ Curriculum Vitae Gerhard Jäger Utrecht Institute of Linguistics (OTS) [1]
↑ CV on sfs.uni-tuebingen.de [2]
↑ Gerhard Jäger. Professor of General Linguistics “I was reminded of Jena”, Gerhard Jäger remembers his first impressions of Tübingen. Jäger, who was born in Jena almost 43 years ago, is not the first to notice (above all) the topographical similarities between the Neckar and Saale towns. Schwäbisches Tagblatt April 12, 2010 [3]
^ Hugo Reyes-Centeno , Katerina Harvati , Gerhard Jäger: Tracking modern human population history from linguistic and cranial phenotype. Scientific Reports volume 6, Article number: 36645 (2016) [4]

personal data
SURNAME	Hunter, Gerhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German linguist
DATE OF BIRTH	April 18, 1967
PLACE OF BIRTH	Jena

[1] Curriculum Vitae Gerhard Jäger Utrecht Institute of Linguistics (OTS) [1]

[2] CV on sfs.uni-tuebingen.de [2]

[3] Gerhard Jäger. Professor of General Linguistics “I was reminded of Jena”, Gerhard Jäger remembers his first impressions of Tübingen. Jäger, who was born in Jena almost 43 years ago, is not the first to notice (above all) the topographical similarities between the Neckar and Saale towns. Schwäbisches Tagblatt April 12, 2010 [3]

[4] Hugo Reyes-Centeno , Katerina Harvati , Gerhard Jäger: Tracking modern human population history from linguistic and cranial phenotype. Scientific Reports volume 6, Article number: 36645 (2016) [4]