Durand, Jacques & Chantal S. Lyche. 2026. Paul Passy, A Radical Linguist: Language Teaching, Spelling Reform, and the Creation of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 268 p. ISBN 9780198929857
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This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the life and work of the French linguist Paul Passy (1859-1940), with a focus on his significant contributions to the fields of linguistics and phonetics. Renowned as a pioneering educator, Passy was the driving force behind the creation of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which is widely used today in the teaching of modern languages and in phonetic descriptions of the languages of the world. Jacques Durand and Chantal Lyche explore how Passy’s advocacy for spelling reform and his promotion of the Direct Method in foreign language teaching were deeply rooted in his social and spiritual commitments as a Christian socialist. The chapters also shed light on the influence that contemporary British linguists such as Alexander Melville Bell, Alexander John Ellis, Isaac Pitman, and Henry Sweet had on his thought, as well as on his later productive collaboration with Daniel Jones in the creation of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Durand and Lyche’s close examination of Passy’s scholarly and pedagogical output reveals a visionary figure whose legacy continues to resonate in modern descriptive and applied linguistics.
Hassler, Gerda. 2026. Evidentiality in Romance Languages. Berlin : Peter Lang (Linguistica Philologica, 3). 462 p. DOI: 10.3726/b23560
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While all languages can express epistemic awareness regarding the source of a message’s content, Romance languages lack mandatory indicators. Such markers enhance confidence in sources such as journalism by specifying whether information is based on experience, hearsay or inference. Although they are not apparent, we can elucidate this by explicitly stating the origin of our knowledge, typically to lessen responsibility. Over the past 30 years, studies have explored markers of knowledge origin, yet consensus on evidentiality markers and effective research methods remains elusive. This book takes a comparative approach, focusing on content as well as linguistic forms such as adverbs, adjectives, verbs and tenses. Evidentiality provides non-predicative information and distinguishes between sources of information such as personal observation, external communication or inference. Communication generally lacks differentiation of sources, resulting in broad evidential-epistemic marking.
Anandakichenin, Suganya, Neela Bhaskar, Cristina Muru, and Margherita Trento , dir. 2026. Words Can Mean Anything: A Lexicographic Volume in Honour of Jean-Luc Chevillard. Pondichéry: École française d’Extrême-Orient / Institut Français de Pondichéry (Collection Indologie, 169 ; NETamil Series, 11). 517 p. EAN 9788184702620
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Words Can Mean Anything is a volume honouring Jean-Luc Chevillard, whose scholarship has profoundly shaped the fields of Tamil studies, lexicography, philology, and manuscript studies. Bringing together leading scholars and emerging researchers from across the world, the volume explores the many ways in which words acquire, transmit, and transform meaning across texts, genres, languages, and historical periods.
The contributions explore Tamil lexicography, semantic change, multilingual literary traditions, and the interpretation of difficult words across a wide range of texts and periods. Drawing on Tamil, Sanskrit, Manipravalam, and other sources, they highlight the importance of contextual and philological approaches to meaning.
The volume also marks the first major publication emerging from the Tamilex project, a long-term initiative devoted to the preparation of a historical dictionary of the Tamil language of the first millennium CE. Several of the chapters originated as papers presented at the inaugural Tamilex conference, making this book the first collective outcome of that scholarly collaboration.
Together, these studies offer fresh perspectives on the interpretation of words and texts while celebrating Jean-Luc Chevillard’s contribution to the study of Tamil language and literature.
Tola, Gabriele, ed. 2026. Basilio Brollo’s Dictionarium sinico-latinum (Chinese-Latin dictionary): A critical edition of the manuscript Rinuccini 22 (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana). Amsterdam : Benjamins (Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 134). xxviii, 1029 p. ISBN ISBN 9789027237583
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This publication is the first and long-awaited critical edition of the Dictionarium sinico-latinum (Chinese-Latin dictionary) by the Franciscan missionary Basilio Brollo (1648–1704; Chinese name, Ye Zunxiao 葉尊孝). This publication thoroughly researches for the first time a lexicographical milestone, copied and plagiarised for centuries as a fundamental linguistic instrument. It is aimed not only at scholars of missionary linguistics, lexicography, and lexicology, but also represents an essential reference for researchers of cultural interaction between Europe and China, and of conceptual history.
Based on the edition stored in Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, known as “Rinuccini 22” (1694), this volume opens with a variety of research articles on different linguistic, historical, and cultural aspects of the Dictionarium, followed by the transcription of the whole dictionary, including Chinese characters and their variants, romanisations, Latin definitions, examples, and Chinese glosses. This is one of the results of the PRIN 2022 PNRR project “CHIN-DICTIONARY”, led by Gabriele Tola.
Do Nascimento Flores, Valdir, dir. 2026. Percursos históricos e epistemológicos da linguística [Dossier thématique]. Fragmentum 66(2). 87 p. e-ISSN 2179-2194
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Apresentação
Valdir do Nascimento Flores
Tradução
Como fazer a história da linguística?
Claudine Normand
Seria preciso defender Saussure contra seus amadores? notas incessantes sobre a etimologia saussuriana
Jürgen Trabant
Um momento importante na história das ciências humanas: a obra de Ferdinand de Saussure
Michel Arrivé
Ferdinand de Saussure e a constituição de um domínio de memória para a linguística moderna
Christian Puech & Jean-Louis Chiss
Vișan, Ruxandra, ed. 2026. Dictionary-Making in History and the Construction of Hegemonic Discourses. Leyde : Brill. (Lexicography, Terminology, and Society, 3). x, 223 p. ISBN 978-90-04-76168-1
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Dictionaries are complex, many-layered works: not only are they shaped by the cultural discourses of their time; they also actively shape the ways in which we perceive the world. Tracing a historical journey from eighteenth-century Europe to the present day, the contributions in this volume examine a rich variety of English and Romance dictionaries. Whether monolingual or bilingual, general-purpose or specialised, dictionaries emerge as indispensable components of the dominant discourses that we so often take for granted. This book sheds light on how dictionaries acquired this influential role.
Histoire Epistémologie Langage 48(1). 2026. Aux périphéries de la « science allemande »: De Johann J. Bodmer à la Revue des langues romanes. Dossier thématique présenté par Didier Samain. Paris: SHESL. 312 p. ISSN: 0750-8069
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Hommage
Douglas A. Kibbee
Hans Aarsleff (1925–2026)
Aux périphéries de la « science allemande »: De Johann J. Bodmer à la Revue des langues romanes
Didier Samain
Photographies de la science allemande et cartographies d’une époque
Marie Odoul
Des Vrais Principes de l’Abbé Girard aux Grundsätze de Johann Jakob Bodmer : adaptations et partis pris morphologiques
Felix de Montety
A Philological Geographer? Alexander von Humboldt, Julius Klaproth and the Quest for a Linguistic Homeland in Asia
Despina Magkanari
Julius Klaproth between France and Russia. Transnational Circulations and Scholarly Practices of European Orientalism in the Early Nineteenth Century
Daniel Petit
La constitution de la terminologie de la grammaire comparée indo-européenne au xixe siècle
Francesca Zantedeschi
Making Linguistics Beyond Paris: The Revue des langues romanes and German Models (1870–1914)
Andrés Jiménez Ángel
Transferts culturels transatlantiques : la science du langage en Colombie 1867-1911
Enrica Galazzi
La dissémination de la phonétique expérimentale en Europe entre 1889 et 1938. Une étude de cas
Carlotta Santini
La méthode historico-critique et le traitement des sources entre philologie et anthropologie : Fritz Graebner et sa réception américaine
Varia
Mårten Söderblom Saarela
Willem A. Grootaers’s Training in Chinese Language and Linguistics, with a Brief Discussion of his Early Publications on Chinese Dialectology
Silvia Frigeni
Le rêve de Meillet. L’étude des langues de civilisation face aux troubles politiques du xxe siècle
Roger Comtet
Jan Ignacy Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929) et la classification des langues
Ivaylo Burov
Le phonème dans la « phonologie saussurienne » : la genèse d’un concept systématique et structural
Lectures et critiques
Archaimbault, Sylvie, Olga Artyushkina & Stéphane Viellard, dir. 2026. Études en linguistique ukrainienne [dossier thématique]. Revue des études slaves 97(1-2). 243 p. DOI https://doi.org/10.4000/16ofg
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Journal in open access
Sylvie Archaimbault, Olga Artyushkina and Stéphane Viellard
Avant-propos
Olga Artyushkina
Le marquage discursif du prospectif, du proximatif et de l’appréhensif en ukrainien
Oleg Chinkarouk
La catégorie grammaticale du gérondif en tant que forme verbale en ukrainien contemporain
Jan Fellerer
The Development of Relative Clauses in Modern Ukrainian: Lexical Variation over Syntactic Change
Olha Zanevych
Innovations dans la formation du système grammatical de la langue ukrainienne au tournant du xxe siècle
Andrii Danylenko
Ivan Nečuj-Levyc′kyj and the Galician “New Jazyčiȇ”
Kateryna Karunyk
The Role of “Urban Koine” and “Folklore Koine” in the Formation of Standard Ukrainian
Yuliya Mayilo
Le concept de « résistance linguistique » dans la sociolinguistique ukrainienne contemporaine
Nataliia Romanyshyn
Words of War: the Actualization of Anthropocentric Concepts in Contemporary Ukrainian War Fiction
Oksana Prosianyk
La traduction ukrainienne des termes saussuriens « parole » et « discours »
Historiographia Linguistica 53(1). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 194 p. ISSN 0302-5160
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Articles
The two senses of etymology : A concise history
Michele Loporcaro
A tale of two languages: Macrobius on Greek and Latin
Kees Versteegh
Mais qu’est-ce donc que le ʾiḫbār? Focus et présupposition(s) en grammaire arabe
Pierre Larcher
A corpus-based network analysis of onomastic references in 16th- and 17th century British grammar writing
Nina Dumrukcic, Beatrix Busse & Sophie Du Bois
The category of preposición in early missionary grammars of Aymara (Bertonio 1603 and Torres Rubio 1616): Between inflection and suffixation
Edoardo Nardi
Addendum to “The distributed invention of enunciation theory”
John E. Joseph
Book reviews
Désiré Érasme de Rotterdam. 2024. De recta Latini Græcique sermonis pronuntiatione dialogus. Édition, traduction et commentaire
Reviewed by Raf Van Rooy
Pierre-Yves Testenoire. 2025. Les Cours de Roman Jakobson à l’École libre des hautes études: New York, 1942–1946.
Reviewed by John E. Joseph
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