I am a 4th year PhD student in the Program in Indo-European Studies at UCLA. Trained as a historical linguist, Indo-Europeanist, and a phonologist, I am broadly interested in the evolution and spatial distributions of phonological variables. To study this, I combine Bayesian spatial and phylogenetic models with large-scale analyses of phonetic and experimental data.
Please look around and feel free to contact me with questions about any of my work and requests for code. I am also very happy to collaborate on projects if you see something on the site that catches your eye!
Publications
- 2026E-lorgesailie: An Agent-Based Simulation Model of Acheulean Lithic Raw Material Procurement and Handaxe Deposition PatternsJournal of Archaeological Method and Theory
- forthcomingRe-evaluating the Word-Medial Operation of the Saussure-Hirt Effect in GreekProceedings of the 4th International Conference on Ancient Greek Linguistics
- 2026Gk. μοιχός ’adulterer’: Re-mixing a Piss-Poor EtymologyProceedings of the 35th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference
- 2023Gendered Language in Aristophanes’ BirdsPersephone
- 2021The Estuarine Ecological Knowledge Network: Future ProspectsMarine Technology and Science Journal
Presentations
2027
Vowel-to-vowel coarticulation is language specific and modulated by phonology.
LSA Annual Meeting 2027, Jan. 8
2027
Infants' discrimination of sound pairs predicts their occurrence in the world's languages.
Five-Minute Linguist, LSA Annual Meeting 2027, Jan. 8
2026
Positional asymmetries in consonantal sound change.
5th AMC Symposium: "Types of Evidence in Historical Linguistics", Dec. 9
2026
A tool to derive P-map constraints from infants' discriminability of phonetic contrasts.
Annual Meeting on Phonology, Oct. 9
2026
Modeling alphabet diffusion and community interactions in ancient Italy with spatiotemporal point processes.
Connected Past 2026, Sept. 23
2026
Language contact is not consistently associated with increased feature economy.
Typology in Historical Phonology Workshop 2026, Aug. 25
2026
MoPSoS: Introduction to the database of Ancient Greek morphology, prosody, syntax and scansion.
"Epic through Numbers" panel, Celtic Conference in Classics, Jul. 15
2026
Spatiophylogenetic modeling provides new insights into feature economy.
qc-leste: Quantitative Cross-Linguistic Explorations of Space, Time, and Evolution, Jun. 10
2026
Point processes and spatiotemporal modeling of alphabet spread in ancient Italy.
DataX, UCLA, May 19
2026
The phonetic value of Avestan <å>.
American Society for Premodern Asia Annual Meeting, Apr. 24
2026
2026
Discerning segmental stability using phylogenetic models.
Southern California Annual Meeting on Phonology, Apr. 11
2026
From points to polygons: Modeling spatial autocorrelation.
Special workshop on "The geography of linguistic evolution", EVOLANG XVI, Apr. 7
2026
Lexical stress and syllable weight in Hindi-Urdu pop text-setting.
Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting 2026, Jan. 9
2025
Investigating lexical stress in Hindi-Urdu pop music.
Sixth Joint Meeting of Acoustical Society of America and Acoustical Society of Japan, Dec. 5
2025
The development of word-final stops in Hittite.
AnatoLinks, University of Oxford, Dec. 4
2025
Synchronic phonetic variation drives diachronic sound change: Further evidence from pre-nasal raising in Young Avestan.
7th Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology, Dec. 2
2025
Converging computational evidence against an East-Germanic clade.
WeCIEC 36, Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, Oct. 28
2025
Issues of lexical cognacy encoding in IE-CoR.
27th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Aug. 18
2025
Population size has a weak effect on phoneme inventory size.
Poster presented at the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute, University of Oregon, Jul. 10
2025
Re-evaluating the word-medial operation of the Saussure-Hirt effect in Greek.
11th International Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics, Jun. 26
2025
Word-final voicing in Hittite?
Southern California Annual Meeting on Phonology 2025, Apr. 12
2024
Re-mixing a piss-poor etymology: On Gk. μοιχός and OE (ge)māh.
WeCIEC 35, Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, Oct. 25
2024
Towards an integrative approach to the investigation of linguistic phylogenies.
5th Munich-UCLA Historical Linguistics Colloquium, Jun. 28
2024
FSAs, FSTs and sequence alignment in phylogenetic studies: The case of Tocharian B.
UCLA Program in Indo-European Studies Graduate Seminar, May 29
selected publications
- Supervised Measurement of Christian LatinSubmitted
@unpublished{rehan_supervised_submitted, author = {Rehan, Muhammad and Lunardi, Valentina and Goldstein, David}, title = {Supervised Measurement of Christian Latin}, year = {Submitted}, }