In this talk, Penny Lee presents some preliminary results from her research into the personal diaries of Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941).
Blog Archives
A Danish Framing of Roman Jakobson’s American Years – Review of From the early years of Phonology
Patrick Flack University of Fribourg Over the last decade or so, we have been treated to a steady succession of book-length publications dedicated to the intellectual legacy of Roman Jakobson. This near continuous stream started with the release of the…
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The return of the human in the study of writing
Piers Kelly University of New England In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the study of writing systems. Much of the new impetus has come from linguists investigating the interactions between graphic structure and linguistic structure. Yet practitioners…
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Death of a purist or how Dutch appeared to be a dangerous mother tongue
Camiel HamansUniversity of Amsterdam/Adam Mickiewicz University PoznaÅ„ 27 June 1668, the Amsterdam prosecutor demanded a remarkable punishment: the accused should be displayed on the scaffold, his right thumb should be cut off, his tongue should be pierced with a glowing…
Significs and Jacques van Ginneken
Els Elffers University of Amsterdam Introduction The Dutch Signific movement (ca. 1900–1960) is not widely known, although in the last few decades it has attracted considerable scholarly interest. This has resulted in some valuable publications (see the bibliography). The movement’s…
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Racialization, language science, and nineteenth century anthropometrics
Margaret Thomas Boston College Introduction In May 2019, the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America approved of a ‘Statement on Race’ (https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/lsa-statement-race), which puts on record the society’s opposition to racialization in the study of language, and in…
Lénine, Saussure et la théorie des hiéroglyphes
Patrick Sériot Universités de Lausanne et de Saint-Pétersbourg Introduction La réception positive de Saussure est bien connue, elle est au fondement des manuels de linguistique générale dans la plupart des pays. Curieusement, on s’attarde beaucoup moins sur sa réception négative,…
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Johann Christoph Adelung, a forerunner of modern bilingual lexicography
Jacques François University of Caen-Normandy http://www.interlingua.fr 1. A forgotten German Enlightenment philosopher Johann Christoph Adelung (1732–1806) was one of the main promoters of the Volksaufklärung (popular Enlightenment) in the vein of Christian Wolff, eager to synthetize what the broad cultivated…
Galant grammarians: Donneau de Visé’s Mercure galant
Doyle Calhoun Yale University (Department of French) What was the Mercure galant and why should it interest historians of linguistics? Founded in 1672 by Jean Donneau de Visé (1638–1710) — journalist and royal historiographer under Louis XIV — the bestselling…
What is Syriac and what is Aramaic according to Syriac grammarians (8th-16th cent.)
Margherita Farina Histoire des Théories Linguistiques (Paris) What is Aramaic? In modern linguistic terms, we can say that Aramaic is a linguistic group, composed by dialectal varieties defined on a geographical, chronological and socio-cultural basis. For example, we speak about…
