Die Gesellschaft fĂŒr Interlinguistik e.V. (GIL) lĂ€dt herzlich ein zu ihrer Jahrestagung 2018 mit dem Schwerpunkthema
Sprache und Globalisierung Read more ›
Call for Papers: “A host of tongues” â Multilingualism, lingua franca and translation in the Early Modern period
FCSH-UNL, Lisbon, 13th to 15th December 2018
In the 15th and 16th centuries, the linguistic situation in Europe was one of remarkable fluidity. Latin, the great scholarly lingua franca of the medieval period, was beginning to crack as the tectonic plates shifted beneath it, but the vernaculars had not yet crystallized into the national languages that they would become a century later, and bi- or multilingualism was still rife. Through the influence of print capitalism, the dialects that occupied the informal space were starting to organise into broad fields of communication and exchange (Anderson 2006: 37-46), though the boundaries between them were not yet clearly defined nor the links to territory fully established. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, languages were coming into contact with an intensity that they had never had before (Burke 2004: 111-140), influencing each other and throwing up all manner of hybrids and pidgins as peoples tried to communicate using the semiotic resources they had available. New lingua francas emerged to serve particular purposes in different geographic regions or were imposed through conquest and settlement (Ostler 2005: 323-516). And translation proliferated at the seams of such cultural encounters, undertaken for different reasons by a diverse demographic that included missionaries, scientists, traders, aristocrats, emigrĂ©s, refugees and renegades (Burke 2007: 11-16). Read more ›
Posted in Announcements, Conferences and workshops
Query: Boas on Alternating Sounds
What secondary literature exists on the historical context and significance of Franz Boas’ (1889) essay “On alternating sounds” or on his approach to phonology more generally? Read more ›
Posted in Announcements, Queries and discussion
CALL FOR PAPERS: I° National Conference of History of linguistic and semiotic thought, Rome (17-18 September 2018)
CALL FOR PAPERS
I° National Conference of History of linguistic and semiotic thought
State of the art and case studies
Organized by CISPELS â Rome, Department of Philosophy, at Villa Mirafiori, 17-18 September 2018
The first National Conference of the CISPELS (Inter-society coordination for the history of linguistic and semiotic thought) will be held in Rome (17-18 september 2018) hosted by âSapienzaâ University of Rome, Department of Philosophy (chairs of Philosophy of Language and the Laboratorio di Storia delle idee linguistiche).After three years of shared activities, punctuated by the annual Summer Schools in Stresa (III edition 16-20.7.2018), and with the intention of merging the organization of Ichols XV (Milan, 2020), the first CISPELS conference is aimed to:
Posted in Announcements, Conferences and workshops
Grant proposals: Language Acts and Worldmaking
The deadline for this round of funding is midnight on 27th May 20.
Application form available here
Languages Memory is the theme for the first Language Acts and Worldmaking conference, due to be held in Bush House, London, 13-14 June 2018. We would like to extend these ideas to our latest call for small grants proposals. Through both the conference and our small grants scheme we want to enliven our awareness of the ways in which languages are experienced, practised, taught and researched. We will reflect upon the place of language learning and engage with the material and historical force of languages in the world. We are looking for proposals that relate to these issues, thinking across the six research strands of our project. Possible themes for you to explore are: Read more ›
Posted in Announcements, Jobs and funding
Panel proposal: Linguistics as a Go-Between
Panel proposal for The Making of the Humanities VII, Amsterdam, 15-17 November 2018.
For the upcoming 7th The Making of the Humanities Conference, to be held in Amsterdam from November 15-17 2018 (link) I am contemplating to submit a panel session under the title âLinguistics as a Go-Betweenâ. The theme of this session will be the interaction of linguistics with other fields of study. While perhaps all academic disciplines have at some point exchanged theories, concepts, metaphors, methods, instruments, etc. with other (proto-) disciplines in the course of their existence, the extent to which this epistemic transfer has occurred with respect to the study of language appears to be exceptional. This has of course not gone unnoticed in the historiography of linguistics, and many cases of the interaction of linguistics with for example biology, anthropology, psychology, chemistry, information science and of course the humanistic disciplines such as philology, history, etc. have been documented. Yet, the vast majority of these studies remain âisolatedâ, in the sense that they are not compared to other case studies of epistemic transfer with the aim to gain a deeper understanding of the phenomenon itself. In this respect a general picture of the history of linguistics is thus lacking. Read more ›
Posted in Announcements, Conferences and workshops
Recent publications in the history and philosophy of linguistics, April 2018
Below is a list of some monographs and collected volumes in the history and philosophy of linguistics that have appeared recently. Read more ›
Posted in Announcements, Publications
Some reflections on the uses and abuses of theory in linguistic thought
Jon Orman
My purpose in this piece is to offer a few brief thoughts on a series of questions with which I have become increasingly interested in recent months. Linguistics, it seems to me, is awash with theories and theoretical work of various sorts, yet it is not all that often that one comes across any critical scrutiny of the theoretical enterprise itself. The basic question motivating my discussion can be put thus: why theorise language? In other words, what motivates the theoretical enterprise in relation to language and what sustains it? This sets in train a series of further questions. Why is there apparently such faith, amongst language scholars at least, in theory? What does theory contribute to our understanding of a human phenomenon? Is it genuine, previously unavailable knowledge or simply a different and perhaps also professionally advantageous way of talking about it? Are theoretical enterprises generated and propelled by genuine intellectual puzzles or anomalies that challenge our settled conception of the world or more by particular ambitions? Or is it the case that where language is concerned theory tends instead to generate merely its own internal puzzles â academic questions in the most pejorative sense of the word? This raises the issue of how, why and by whom particular theories of language come to be valued, which in turn potentially prompts questions which take on a more sceptical tone such as âis it possible to theorise language without somehow giving a distorted view or misrepresenting it?â or even âwhat do we lose sight of by submitting language to theoretical treatment?â Read more ›
What Zarathustra said: The sixty-year controversy regarding Anquetil-Duperron’s Zend-Avesta
Floris Solleveld
University of Amsterdam
Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, Zend-Avesta, ouvrage de Zoroastre, vol. I (1771), title page (source)
In 1771, a French scholarly adventurer by the name of Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron shocked the Republic of Letters with his translation of Zend-Avesta, Ouvrage de Zoroastre. Published in three volumes with a long series of appendices and a book-length introduction about Anquetil’s travels in India, it offered the first known example of a monotheistic text with no direct relation to Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.
The shock was not that there was a Persian prophet called Zoroaster; his name had been known in Europe since antiquity. (Modern-day readers may know him as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra or Mozart’s Sarastro.) He had been portrayed as an ‘Eastern sage’ from Pico della Mirandola and Marsiliano Ficino to Jacob Brucker’s mid-18th century history of philosophy, and Hyde in Oxford already possessed an Avestan manuscript which had inspired Anquetil’s journey to India in the first place. The shock was that the Zend-Avesta was not a work of prisca theologia or philosophia perennis but a liturgy, at once strangely familiar and uncannily remote, written in a dead language that no one in Europe except Anquetil could read.
[Jean Calmette], [Guillaume de Sainte-Croix, ed.], Ezour-VĂ©dam ou Ancien commentaire du VĂ©dam (1778), title page (source)
Anquetil was duly attacked as a fraud. There was reason for scepticism, for the learned world was grappling with other hoaxes. It had been a mere decade since the Scottish crook MacPherson had won literary fame with his volumes of the songs of Ossian, the ‘Nordic Homer’ – and though MacPherson had been discredited and never showed the ‘old manuscripts’ that he had purportedly found in Scotland, he could still count Goethe and Napoleon among his admirers even after his death.[1] Anquetil himself had been led astray, together with Voltaire, by manuscripts of a supposedly ‘Vedic’ text with Christian undertones, fabricated by a Jesuit missionary, which was published in 1778 as L’Ezour-Vedam: ou, Ancien commentaire du Vedam, contenant l’exposition des opinions religieuses & philosophiques des Indiens.[2] The spectacular story of Anquetil’s oriental manuscript hunt, which included a duel, a flight through the jungle, and wheeling and dealing with the English and French in the middle of the Seven Years’ War, also raised eyebrows among more sedentary scholars.
The most malicious attack came from William Jones, then a budding young orientalist who had just finished a Persian grammar. In an anonymous Lettre Ă M. A*** du P***, he argued a) that Anquetil hardly knew enough modern Persian to communicate with his informants in Surat, and these Parsi priest themselves hardly understood the dead languages of their holy books (this was true); b) that Anquetil was an impolite and unreliable rascal (this was half-true); and c) that what he presented as the Zend-Avesta was too ‘absurd’, ‘tedious’, and ‘repetitive’ to be a genuine holy text. Read more ›
Lawyers, Linguists and Truthiness
Douglas Kibbee
University of Illinois
Michigan Supreme Court in the Hall of Justice. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Are lies information? This was the question before the Supreme Court of Michigan in a 2016 case (People v. Harris, based on a 2009 incident). A police officer was charged with pulling a motorist out of his car and beating him; he and two other police officers were charged with obstruction of justice for lying about what happened. Michigan law protects officers from self-incrimination by providing that “an involuntary statement made by a law enforcement officer, and any information derived from that involuntary statement, shall not be used against the law enforcement officer in a criminal proceeding.” The law further defines an involuntary statement as any information that might lead to dismissal from the force or other sanctions. The question before the court was: Are false statements information, and thus protected?
To answer the question the court turned first to dictionaries, following a trend that has increased dramatically since the mid-1980s. In the 1960s dictionaries were referenced in only sixteen opinions of the US Supreme Court; in the decade 2000â2010 dictionaries were cited in 225 opinions (Kirchmeier & Thumma 2010:85). The judicial philosophy of Strict Textualism, also referred to as Originalism and New Originalism, has spurred this lexicological turn. The late Justice Antonin Scalia was a leading proponent of this approach, which claims to seek the “original public meaning” of the Constitution and subsequent statutes. The justices attempt to assess how the public would have understood these texts at the time they were written. The alleged purpose of these efforts is to keep appointed judges from rewriting laws written and voted on by elected representatives (Solum 2011 and 2017 traces the twists and turns of this judicial philosophy). Read more ›
History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences 
