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…
Blog Archives
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…
History of Linguistics in Australia
The following are a selection of three talks on the history of linguistics in Australia originally delivered at the meeting of the Society for the History of Linguistics in the Pacific, December 2020. Jane Simpson, Grammars for analysis, grammars for…
The Facts of Whorf’s Hopi Research
In this talk, Penny Lee presents some preliminary results from her research into the personal diaries of Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941).
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…
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…
Podcast episode 4: Interview with Jürgen Trabant on Wilhelm von Humboldt
In this episode, we talk to Jürgen Trabant about Wilhelm von Humboldt.
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…
Podcast episode 3: Language classification
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.
