About

Danny Law is an Associate Professor and the Director of The Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, within the College of Liberal Arts. His research focuses on Historical Linguistics, Language Contact, Mayan Languages, and Writing Systems. As a faculty member, he contributes to the academic community through his expertise in these areas, engaging in research that advances understanding of linguistic history and the interactions between languages. His role involves both scholarly research and leadership within the Linguistics Research Center, supporting the study and preservation of linguistic diversity and history.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Linguistics
• Natural Language Processing
• Biology
• Programming language
• Computational biology
• Philosophy
• Chromatography
• Ecology
• Combinatorial chemistry
• Biochemistry
• Chemistry

Selected publications

• Advances in the Historical Linguistics of Signed Languages

  Language and Linguistics Compass · 2025-10-21 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  ABSTRACT Scholarship in the field of sign historical linguistics has made important progress in recent years. Here we survey this progress in three areas of research that have received the most attention to date, namely, (i) qualitative approaches to understanding the typical pathways of diachronic change in signed languages, (ii) quantitative approaches to signed language classification, and (iii) archival approaches to historical sociolinguistic research on signing communities and their languages. We also discuss how early work on sign historical linguistics has shaped the field's current questions and approaches, and we look forward to future advances that can tap into underutilized sources of historical video data on signed languages.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Chemical and linguistic considerations for encoding Chinese characters: an embodiment using chain-end degradable sequence-defined oligourethanes created by consecutive solid phase click chemistry

  Chemical Science · 2024 · 11 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Chemistry

  consecutive click reaction approach on an oligourethane backbone for writing, and a previously reported chain-end degradation routine for reading, we encoded/decoded a confucius proverb written in Chinese characters using two encoding schemes: Unicode and Zhèng Mă. Unicode is an internationally standardized arbitrary string of hexadecimal (base-16) symbols which efficiently encodes uniquely identifiable symbols but requires complete fidelity of transmission, or context-based inferential strategies to be interpreted. The Zhèng Mă approach encodes with a base-26 system using the visual characteristics and internal composition of Chinese characters themselves, which leads to greater ambiguity of encoded strings, but more robust retrievability of information from partial or corrupted encodings. The application of information-encoded oligourethanes to two different encoding systems allowed us to establish their flexibility and versatility for data storage. We found the oligourethanes immensely adaptable to both encoding schemes for Chinese characters, and we highlight the expected tradeoff between the efficiency and uniqueness of Unicode encoding on the one hand, and the fidelity to a scripts' particular visual characteristics on the other.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Pedagogical Tipiṭaka: OER & the Three Baskets of Ancient Language Instruction

  Cahiers du Centre de Linguistique et des Sciences du Langage · 2024-10-16 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Ancient languages present a unique teaching challenge: for spoken languages, common pedagogy recommends engaging students via dialogue; for ancient languages, no speakers survive with whom to practise. This paper highlights how the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin has approached this challenge by creating the Early Indo-European OnLine (EIEOL) collection, an online educational resource whose lesson series present early languages directly through original, unsimplified ancient texts. Currently accessed by over 20,000 users per month, EIEOL spans 18 languages, from Greek and Latin to Old Church Slavonic, Sanskrit, and other important languages of ancient Asia such as Hittite, Classical Armenian, Avestan, and Tocharian. Each series presents extensively annotated excerpts of original texts in the target language, with accompanying modules explaining grammar and context. The text-centred approach affords learners a direct path to understanding that suits a variety of experience levels and minimises the conceptual grammatical apparatus necessary to begin interpreting original texts. This format fosters theoretical flexibility, adaptable to different approaches and grammatical descriptions of ancient languages. It is also useful for languages whose grammatical structures have shifted dramatically over their history, like Tocharian, or remain hotly debated or under-described by experts. Finally, it facilitates applications to typologically diverse languages and language families, with early Mesoamerican, Semitic, and Sino-Tibetan language series already under development. The EIEOL infrastructure therefore provides a robust platform for free, text-centred, self-paced introductions to ancient languages from a variety of language families.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Introduction

  2021-06-18

  book-chapter

  This chapter explores the contributions that endangered and lesser-studied languages are making to historical linguistics. These insights offer important revisions to models of change that have been constructed primarily with reference to standard and well-attested languages. The chapter also emphasizes the value of rich, open-ended documentation of connected speech for exploring the world’s variety of grammatical structures and their pathways of development, particularly for endangered languages. Recent decades have seen an explosion of work focused on the documentation and description of endangered and lesser-studied languages, with many initiatives led by and/or carried out in close collaboration with their speakers and community members. Work on endangered and understudied languages is feeding a growing list of ways in which processes of language change are sensitive to social, cultural, and/or typological variables. The fields of historical linguistics and endangered language research are moving in new and exciting directions, enriched by the deepening synergy between them.

  PublisherDOI

• Historical Linguistics and Endangered Languages

  Routledge eBooks · 2021 · 3 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Computer Science

  "This collection showcases the contributions of the study of endangered and understudied languages to historical linguistic analysis and the broader relevance of diachronic approaches toward developing better informed approaches to language documentation and description. Bringing together perspectives from both established and up-and-coming scholars representing a globally and linguistically diverse range of languages, the volume demonstrates the ways in which endangered languages have and can challenge existing models of language change based around standard languages and generate innovative insights into linguistic phenomena, including pathways of grammaticalization, forms and dynamics of contact-drive change, and the diachronic relationship between lexical and grammatical categories. In so doing, the book highlights the notion that processes of language change long held to be universal are in fact shaped by cultural and typological variability. Taken together, this collection brings together perspectives from language documentation and historical linguistics toward pointing the way forward for richer understandings of language change and documentation and description, making this key reading for scholars in these fields"--

  PublisherDOI

• Pattern borrowing, linguistic similarity, and new categories: Numeral classifiers in Mayan

  Morphology · 2020 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Linguistics
  PublisherDOI

• Contact and Mayan Languages

  2020-07-28 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 4. Contact-induced semantic change

  2019-08-03 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Discourse in the Longue Durée: A View of Mayan Poetic Inertia

  Journal of Linguistic Anthropology · 2019-08-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Discourse is dynamic and emergent, yet certain elements of discourse can appear remarkably stable, enduring across centuries. This discursive inertia gives us evidence of discourse in the past, allowing us to put current discursive moments in a longue durée context. Discursive inertia also begs avenues of investigation in its own right. We here discuss the common poetic patterns of chiasmus and difrasismo on one branch of the Mayan language family, consisting of Classic Mayan, documented in hieroglyphic inscriptions, Colonial Ch'olti’, and contemporary Ch'orti’ Mayan. Texts from these languages share poetic discourse that speak to the long perseverance of discursive patterns.

  PublisherDOI

• Clifton Pye. <i>The comparative method of language acquisition research</i>

  Diachronica · 2019-07-22

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Norman Yoffee

  6 shared

• John Robertson

  5 shared

• Geoff Emberling

  4 shared

• Stephen Houston

  John Brown University

  4 shared

• John Baines

  Queensland Health

  4 shared

• Patience Epps

  3 shared

• Hans Jörg Nissen

  3 shared

• Wang Haicheng

  3 shared