An escaped tiger believed to be owned by Germany's Tiger Queen has been shot dead by police after attacking one of its keepers, according to local media reports. Police say a 73-year-old man was seriously injured after being attacked on Sunday while he was inside the animal's enclosure, located in a privately-owned facility on the outskirts of the German city of Leipzig. The tiger escaped the enclosure and was found shortly after by armed police, who shot and killed the animal. The site of the enclosure is believed to be owned by controversial trainer and private owner Carmen Zander, who describes herself as Germany's Tiger Queen. The animal was one of eight big cats kept at the industrial site near the German town of Schkeuditz, according to local media.

Language contact is a pervasive phenomenon reflected in the borrowing of words from donor to recipient languages. Most computational approaches to borrowing detection treat all languages under study as equally important, even though dominant languages have a stronger impact on heritage languages than vice versa. We test new methods for lexical borrowing detection in contact situations where dominant languages play an important role, applying two classical sequence comparison methods and one machine learning method to a sample of seven Latin American languages which have all borrowed extensively from Spanish. All methods perform well, with the supervised machine learning system outperforming the classical systems. A review of detection errors shows that borrowing detection could be substantially improved by taking into account donor words with divergent meanings from recipient words.

It's December and was there something else? Right: not Santa is in front of the house but the chapter of coding leipzig. This time we are guests at Saxonia Systems and we prepare a bunch of talks. As always, we'll prepare something. But this should not stop you from submitting your own ideas and talks. So if you have a topic you want to talk about, let us know. And best of all: you've got the chance to introduce yourself to the people and present your topic.