Documenting and describing languages of the world.

Promotor: J.N. Kok, P.E. Slagboom Co-promotor: J.F.J. Laros

The research programme Descriptive and Comparative Linguistics brings together LUCL researchers who focus mainly on descriptive and comparative linguistics.

This grammar describes Sumerian, an ancient Near Eastern language which was spoken in what is now southern Iraq, on the basis of written sources dating from about 2500 to 2000 BC.

Languages spoken around the world differ vastly from  the more familiar Indo-European languages. The courses in this theme aim to introduce you to the immense linguistic diversity still found in the world today. 

This dissertation presents a comprehensive description of Xinka, an indigenous language from southeastern Guatemala. The description is based on a missionary grammar that is titled Arte de la lengua szinca and was written by the priest Manuel Maldonado de Matos around 1773.

On the 29th of June, Martin Kohlberger successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Martin on this achievement!

This grammar provides a description of Sunwar, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in eastern Nepal, based on data collected during twelve months of field work.

In this work, we attempt to answer the question:

Ronald Cramer, in cooperation with Ivan Damgard and Jesper Nielsen (Aarhus University) have recently published the first book ever written on “quantum-secure multi-party computation”. The authors have spent six years to finish this comprising book.

Ronald Cramer (CWI/Leiden) has been awarded a VICI-grant by the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research (NWO) for his research on the mathematical fundaments of secure computation.

On 30 September 2013 Ronald Cramer, head of the Cryptology group of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) and a professor of cryptology at the Mathematical Institute of Leiden University, was inaugurated as a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

Ronald Cramer has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for his proposal 'Algebraic Methods for Stronger Crypto'. He will receive 2.5 million euro for research in the upcoming five years.

Prof. dr. Cramer (Leiden University / Centre for Mathematics & Computer Science) is appointed as ‘Fellow of IACR’. This was announced by the International Association for Cryptologic Research on 8 April 2013.

Saturday 13 February 2016 the daily newspaper Volkskrant published an article based on interviews with Professor Ronald Cramer and Harry Buhrman.

The American magazine WIRED recently published an article on ‘quantum-safe public key encryption’.

Jochem van den Boogert defended his thesis on 18 November 2015

The directorate of the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy (NOVA) has two new members. Ronald Stark (currently at NWO) will be the new Executive Director of NOVA from 1 September. Amina Helmi (Professor of Dynamics, structure and formation of the Milky Way at the University of Groningen) will…

Fokelien Kootstra defended her thesis on 23 April 2019

Promotor: Prof.dr. T.H.W. Bäck

An integrated approach of physiological concepts, advanced statistical approaches and large clinical datasets.

Promotor: P.D. Grünwald

This study describes religion in Java.

Ronald Cramer, Professor at the Mathematical Institute of Leiden University and researcher and head of the research group Cryptology at ‘Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the national research center for mathematics and computers science in the Netherlands, is appointed as a member of the Royal…

Clearance is the most important pharmacokinetic parameter for drug dose selection. Pharmacokinetic information is typically first available in the adult population, and in general only limited pharmacokinetic data are available in children when drugs enter into the market. It is therefore of the utmost…

How can Ronald Mulder run his skates across an ice layer at 60 km/h? His skating blades get help from a lubricating layer of meltwater. In Leiden, physicists found this explanation to be incomplete. Theoretician Hans van Leeuwen and experimental physicist Tjerk Oosterkamp searched for a deeper answe…

This work provides a typologically oriented description of clause linkage strategies in Ket, a highly endangered language spoken in Central Siberia. It is now the only surviving member of the Yeniseian language family with the last remaining speakers residing in the north of Russia’s Krasnoyarsk pro…

This dissertation presents a description of Sandawe, a Khoisan language spoken by approximately 60 000 speakers in Dodoma Region, Tanzania.

This project aims at documenting the Haitian Creole varieties spoken by Haitian migrants in Cuba and the Dominican Republic’s Samaná Peninsula.

This dissertation provides a description of the language Tadaksahak as it is spoken by the Idaksahak, a people group of about 30,000 living in the most eastern part of Mali and several isolated places in western Niger.

This book is the first grammar on Ternate Malay, a local variety of Malay spoken on the island of Ternate, North-Moluccas, Indonesia.

This dissertation for the first time provides a detailed description of Benchnon, a language spoken by approximately 200.000 people in Southwest Ethiopia.