Blog Archives

Language and the Missionary World Map

The Gospels in Amharic, tr. Abu Rumi, ed. Thomas Pell Platt, 1824

Floris SolleveldUniversity of Bristol Two unpublished histories of the British and Foreign Bible Society were written in the 1820s to 1830s (BFBS Archives, Cambridge University Library, GBR/0374/BFBS/BSA/E3/8/1 and E3/8/2). It is unclear to me why there were two, both by

Posted in 19th century, 20th century, Article, History, Missionary Linguistics

Intentionality in phenomenology and speech act theory

Els Elffers 1. Introduction Phenomenology covers a large area, and the same is true of speech act theory. Here I will focus on one point of contact between them, namely intentionality. Intentionality is a key concept in phenomenology and it

Posted in 19th century, 20th century, Article, Linguistics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatics

Colorless green ideas and the others

Martin Konvička (Freie Universität Berlin)* 1 Colorless green ideas In the opening pages of his Syntactic Structures (1957: 15)[1], Noam Chomsky demonstrates the independence of grammar (or syntax) from semantics by referring to the meaningless, yet grammatically well-formed – and

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Posted in 19th century, 20th century, History, Linguistics, Philosophy, Semantics, Syntax

John Goldsmith – Battle in the Mind Fields

John Goldsmith (University of Chicago) has made a series of 10 videos – one for each chapter – about the book Battle in the Mind Fields, which he wrote with Bernard Laks (University of Paris) and published in 2019. A

Posted in 19th century, 20th century, History, Linguistics

History of Linguistics in East and South-East Asia

Below are two talks originally presented at the meeting of the Society for the History of Linguistics in the Pacific, December 2020, on the history of the grammatical description of Vietnamese and Chinese. Quang Anh Le, Time-marking particles and the

Posted in 19th century, 20th century, China, Grammars, History

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

Posted in 19th century, 20th century, Article, History, Linguistics

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

Posted in 18th century, 19th century, Article, History, Lexicography, Linguistics

Podcast episode 4: Interview with Jürgen Trabant on Wilhelm von Humboldt

Jürgen Trabant

In this episode, we talk to Jürgen Trabant about Wilhelm von Humboldt.

Posted in 19th century, Europe, History, Linguistics, Philosophy, Podcast, Typology

Podcast episode 3: Language classification

Wilhelm von Humboldt

In this episode, we look at language classification in the first half of the nineteenth century and at some key ideas in the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt.

Posted in 19th century, History, Linguistics, Podcast, Typology

Podcast episode 2: Comparative-historical linguistics – Bopp and Grimm

Der Boppard ist ein Ort am Rhein; die Bopp-Art sind Pedanterei'n

In this episode, we look at the emergence of comparative-historical grammar, focusing on the work of Franz Bopp and Jacob Grimm.

Posted in 19th century, Denmark, Germany, historical linguistics, History, Linguistics, Podcast

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