In this episode, we examine some of the major critiques directed against the Neogrammarians and see what they tell us about the state of linguistics around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. We focus in particular on the arguments made by Hugo Schuchardt and Karl Vossler.
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Raf van Rooy. 2020. Language or Dialect? The History of a Conceptual Pair. Oxford : Oxford University Press. 384 p. ISBN 9780198845713
Publisher’s website
This book provides a historiographic study of the distinction between language and dialect, a puzzle which has long fascinated linguists and laypeople alike. It offers a comprehensive account of the intriguing and complex history of the language-dialect pair, and shows that its real origins can be found in sixteenth-century humanist scholarship. The book begins with a survey of the prehistory of the language/dialect distinction in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Raf Van Rooy then provides a detailed investigation of the emergence, establishment, and development of the conceptual pair during the early modern period, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, when linguistic diversity was first studied in depth. Finally, the much-debated and ambiguous fate of the language/dialect opposition in modern linguistics is explored: although a number of earlier ideas were adopted by later scholars, many linguists today question the notion of a seemingly arbitrary and subjective distinction between language and dialect.
Read more ›Camiel Hamans
University of Amsterdam/Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań
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 poker, his books and all his writings should be burned, all his property should be confiscated and he himself should be imprisoned for thirty years. The court, made up of the mayors of the city of Amsterdam, and the public gathered in one of the torture chambers of Amsterdam’s town hall, now the royal palace on Dam Square, must have been shocked. After all, the accused was not a mass murderer, thief, or otherwise known criminal, but an esteemed intellectual, with two doctorates from Leiden University, in both law and medicine, and someone who had friends in the College of Mayors. Moreover, his crime involved a book. Luckily, when the sentence fell, it was only ten years in prison, a huge fine and subsequently ten years in exile. In the end, he served only one of these ten years in captivity. He passed away in prison in the early days of October 1669.
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In this episode, we introduce the Neogrammarians, the dominant school of linguistics in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.
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Maria Giovanna SANDRI. 2020. Trattati greci su barbarismo e solecismo. Introduzione ed edizione critica. Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter. Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte. 135. XI + 320 p. ISBN 978-3-11-065908-5
Publisher’s webpage
Scholarship has rarely taken into consideration the Greek grammatical treatises on barbarism and solecism. While some of them remain unpublished down to the present day, others were edited within the large 18th- and 19th-century collections of Greek grammatical and rhetorical works, although the chosen manuscript basis was inadequate, sometimes indeed wholly arbitrary. For this reason, a new edition was urgently needed. The book is opened by a general critical overview of the phenomenon of linguistic correctness in the Greek-speaking world: it is against this benchmark of Hellenismós that barbarism and solecism acquire their sense as phenomena of corruption. The present critical edition has the ambition to publish the known ancient and Byzantine texts related to these phenomena, as they appear in manuscripts preserved throughout the world: a fresh check of all printed library catalogues has revealed 88 relevant codices, all of which are here described, philologically investigated, and used for the constitutio textus. Three texts receive here their editio princeps, others rest on a wider textual basis, and each is equipped with a selective critical apparatus: hypotheses on chronology and authorship can therefore rely on much firmer elements than before.
Read more ›Els Elffers
University of Amsterdam
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 minor characters, however, have not been given much attention so far. This article focuses on the contribution to Significs of one of these minor characters, the Dutch linguist Jacques van Ginneken S.J. (1877–1945), who was involved in the movement from 1919 to 1924. During this period, Van Ginneken’s contribution carried some weight, but failed to exert a substantial influence. This was due to his brief and not very intense involvement, and, moreover, to the fact that his ideas about language and communication differed considerably from those of other members of the movement. Given this difference, the following questions will receive special attention, alongside more general issues: Why did Van Ginneken join the movement at all, and why did he continue his membership for some time? A further question is: Why did he eventually leave the movement?[1]
Significs was an idealistic movement. Its core activities were language analysis, language criticism and, ultimately, language reform. The aim was: to gather together a group of prominent broad-minded intellectuals of various disciplines, in order to create, through language reform, new types of communication, which would be unaffected by vagueness, ambiguities, hidden prejudices and misleading formulations. Misunderstandings and mutual distrust would thus be avoided, and a better and more peaceful world would be made possible. Read more ›
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KU Leuven is advertising a four-year PhD position at the Faculty of Arts as part of the FWO-funded project “Languages writing history: the impact of language studies beyond linguistics (1700-1860)”. The aim of this project is to study the history of the language sciences and the formation of linguistics as a discipline from a ‘post-disciplinary’ point of view: how the study of language evolved from an instrumental subject into an autonomous domain, how it affected other fields of study, and what was lost in the process of discipline formation. The selected candidate will pursue a research project that addresses these issues under the supervision of Dr Toon van Hal (Historical, Comparative, and Applied Linguistics) and Dr Floris Solleveld (Cultural History since 1750). Read more ›
In this episode, we look first at the critiques of Schleicher’s “physical” and Steinthal’s “psychological” theory of language put forward by the American linguist William Dwight Whitney. We then turn to Whitney’s own conception of language as a “human institution” and its intellectual background.
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Mårten SÖDERBLOM SAARELA. 2020. The Early Modern Travels of Manchu. A Script and Its Study in East Asia and Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ncounters with Asia. 288 p. ISBN 9780812252071
Publisher’s website
Manchu was a language first written down as part of the Qing state-building project in Northeast Asia in the early seventeenth century. After the Qing invasion of China in 1644, and for the next two and a half centuries, Manchu was the language of state in one of the early modern world’s great powers. Its prominence and novelty attracted the interest of not only Chinese literati but also foreign scholars. Read more ›
Tours, France, 2–4 June 2021 Read more ›
History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences 