Down the rabbit hole : visualizing linguistic distance and relationships with Alice in Wonderland

During the cross-language learning or experience process, human brains are aware of psychological “distance” between the languages they already know and the ones that they are currently learning or experiencing. Some seem to be closer, while some are more distant. This thesis will explore the approaches to visualize the phonetic and syntactical distance and relationships across ten of the world languages using notation design systems, scatterplots and human articulator diagrams with sample texts from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The three methods mentioned above in this document are used to visualize different aspects of languages. Through simplifying the design of notation systems and showing the quantity of phonetic feature with scatterplots it allows readers to find out the distinct linguistic features which indicate the ‘distance‘ among languages more effectively. 0