The Vivien Law Prize is offered annually by the Henry Sweet Society for the best essay in the history of linguistic ideas. The competition is open to all currently registered students, and to scholars who have received their PhD or equivalent qualification within the last five years. Essays can be up to 8000 words in length. Closing date is 31 October 2015 (extended from 30 September 2015).
Further information is available here: http://www.henrysweet.org/grants-and-prizes/vivien-law-prize/
MarĂa JosĂ© GarcĂa Folgado
Universitat de ValĂšncia â Grupo GIEL
La historia de la enseñanza de la gramĂĄtica es un campo que, en el marco hispĂĄnico, solo recientemente estĂĄ siendo objeto de investigaciĂłn. Aunque desde la HistoriografĂa LingĂŒĂstica se han abordado muchas obras que, stricto sensu, son textos escolares (producidos por enseñantes y para la enseñanza), no se ha tenido en cuenta este hecho en su anĂĄlisis, lo que supone, en Ășltima instancia, una interpretaciĂłn sesgada de la historia gramatical. Un principio determinante en la investigaciĂłn de la gramĂĄtica escolar y su historia es la necesaria imbricaciĂłn en el anĂĄlisis de factores externos e internos que aporten datos empĂricos que permitan abordar desde sus diferentes esferas el fenĂłmeno: no solo el texto, sino el contexto; no solo la teorĂa gramatical, sino los supuestos didĂĄcticos que la acompañan; no solo el autor, sino los receptores (maestros y alumnos), etc. (vid. Swiggers 2012). En este trabajo, ofrecemos una muy breve muestra de investigaciĂłn de tres manuales escolares de gramĂĄtica producidos para un centro concreto (el Instituto de Figueras), en un momento histĂłrico de desarrollo y cambio de las enseñanzas medias en España. Read more ›
Joseph L. Subbiondo
California Institute of Integral Studies
Sir John Stoddart (1773-1856) served as Englandâs advocate in Malta from 1803-1807, editor of The Times from 1814 to 1816, founder and editor of The New Times from 1816 to 1826, and Chief Justice and Justice of the Vice-Admiralty Court in Malta from 1826 to 1840. He was knighted in 1826. Stoddartâs formal education was as notable as his professional career: at Oxford, he earned Bachelor of Arts in 1794, Bachelor of Civil Law in 1798, and Doctor of Civil Law in 1801.
In addition to his career in public service and journalism, Stoddart studied and wrote about the history of universal grammar with remarkable breadth and depth. Moreover, he formulated his own theories regarding the philosophy of language and the historical development of ancient and contemporary languages. His lifetime of research is well represented in his Universal Grammar, or the Pure Science of Language published in 1849; Glossology, or the Historical Relations of Languages published posthumously in 1858, and The Philosophy of Language, a revised and enlarged 700 page edition of both books, published in 1861. My references in this paper are to the 1861 publication.
Peter H. Salus (1976) aptly described Stoddartâs The Philosophy of Language (1861) as âthe last truly universalist workâ (p. 99): he recognized that Stoddartâs publications conclude a significant period of universal grammar that spanned nearly nine centuries. Following Stoddart, universal grammar would not occupy center stage in linguistics until the emergence of transformational generative grammar nearly a century later. Yet despite Stoddartâs insightful and extensive study of universal grammar and its history from ancient origins to the mid-nineteenth century, his work has been overlooked by historians of linguistics. Read more ›
Ken Miner
University of Kansas (emer.)
Esperantism is one of those many small worlds that have more substance to them than outsiders think but less than most insiders think. The twain rarely meet. Much linguistic attention to Esperanto, including almost all of my own, is in Esperanto and therefore inaccessible to non-Esperantists. For this reason I have responded to James McElvennyâs invitation to say something about the language here. I will simply summarize some of the work I and others have done; the basic information about the language, its origin, history and progress, is readily available elsewhere.
My affiliation with Esperanto has been somewhat unusual. I learned the language from the age of about fourteen, but regarding the movement â the attempt to advance Esperanto as a serious solution to the worldâs âlanguage problemâ â from the sixties I favored instead an inward-turning approach: acknowledge the futility of getting the language ârecognizedâ and simply nurture the language and its community of speakers. (Apparently I was not alone; in the eighties, a group sharing this view actually factionalized themselves and are today known as Raumists.)
Not being an âEsperanto salesmanâ (see Language Log for November 21, 2011) I was not disturbed when my later linguistic work, in part following on that of others, revealed aspects of the language well outside its usual portrayal. Throughout the history of the movement, Esperanto was promoted as regular and easy to learn, with intuitive word-formation reducible to early âkeysâ containing, with basic grammar, lists of morphemes (available in 26 languages by 1933). But the regularity of Esperanto is only in its inflectional morphology; its derivational morphology, as actually developed, is quite capricious, and certain aspectual and pragmatic matters are actually undetermined. As for ease of learning, the excellent practical grammar, Plena Manlibro de Esperanta Gramatiko [complete handbook of Esperanto grammar] (ELNA, 2005), by the tireless Bertil Wennergren, runs to nearly 700 pages. For a quick comparison, admittedly perhaps unfair, Michael Coulsonâs Teach Yourself Sanskrit, widely used as a college textbook, is only 513 pages, and it has reading selections and a lexicon. Read more ›
Welcome to the first salon. The purpose of our salons is to provide a forum for discussing topics of interest in linguistic historiography and related fields. This salon will focus on ‘anachronism in linguistic historiography’. The discussion opens below with contributions from:
Everyone is invited — and indeed encouraged — to continue the conversation in the comments thread. Read more ›
Johannes MĂŒcke & Silvio Moreira de Sousa [1]
Hugo Schuchardt Archiv, University of Graz
âInformation is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth.â
Frank Zappa (1979)
Hugo Schuchardt (1842-1927)
Source: Hugo Schuchardt Archiv
The goal of the project “Network of Knowledge” (runtime 2012-2015, FWF project number P 24400-G15, main researcher: Bernhard Hurch) appears to be very linear at first sight: the online, open access presentation (and consequent analysis) of the papers of Hugo Schuchardt (1842-1927), combining the digital facsimile edition of all of Schuchardtâs publications with the also digital edition of his correspondence and a bibliography of secondary literature.
Preserved at the Universityâs library in Graz, the Hugo Schuchardt Papers account for nearly 14,000 letters received from virtually all over the world. The actual tally for the digital edition of Schuchardtâs correspondence is at the moment (May 2015) around more than 2,000 edited letters. Furthermore, all of Schuchardtâs works (a growing number of them also as OCR scanned searchable PDFs) are already available for consultation, together with an ever increasing collection of more than 315 reviews, which are being processed and will be put online. Read more ›
This frontispiece of Fray Gaspar de San AgustĂn’s Conquistas de las Islas Philipinas (1698) is an allegory of the relationship between the colonial State and Church in the Philippines. King Philip II of Spain (right) is seen pointing to the Philippine islands, while St Augustine (left), the founder of the Augustinian order, offers his heart, the usual iconographic symbol for this saint, to illuminate the archipelago through divine light, as symbolized by the Christogram above. Behind the saint are Fray AndrĂ©s de Urdaneta and Fray MartĂn de Rada, the first Augustinians in the Philippines.
Marlon James SALES
Monash University
The pastoral visit of Pope Francis to the Philippines in January 2015, which gathered the biggest crowd ever assembled for a Papal event in history, has put to fore the nexus between translation and religion in this Southeast Asian archipelago. During his many engagements, the Pontiff delivered off-the-cuff homilies in his native Spanish, which were then translated into English by Monsignor Mark Miles of the Vatican Secretariat of State. There were also some instancesâsuch as when the Pope had lunch with victims of typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) in Leyte, or when he spoke with two former street children during a catechesis at the University of Santo Tomasâthat even required that interpretation be done into Filipino, with Manila archbishop Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle stepping in to provide some help.
The role that translation played in the recent Papal visit is indicative of the history of evangelization and colonization of this overwhelmingly Catholic nation. Christianity was introduced into the country by Catholic missionaries, who began arriving in the 16th century as members of expeditions financed by the Spanish Crown. Although the Philippines proved to be a profitless enterprise, it was retained for more than three centuries as a strategic colonial outpost in the Pacific and as a springboard for the evangelization of other Asian nations, most notably China and Japan (Kamen 2002, 203, Phelan 1959, 14). A corollary to the establishment of Spanish settlements in the archipelago was the repartition of its many ethnolinguistic groups as objects of Catholic mission among various religious orders present there (Sueiro Justel 2007, 51). Given that Spanish migration into the country remained scant throughout the colonial period, the priests were the closest contact many Filipinos had with Spain (Ridruejo 2003, 181). Read more ›
Patrick Flack
sdvig press
Le Formalisme russe, Ă bien des Ă©gards, constitue un phĂ©nomĂšne paradoxal. Il a, câest bien connu, fourni les fondements dâune approche systĂ©matique de la littĂ©rature (ou du « langage poĂ©tique « ) et contribuĂ© Ă produire une grande partie du lexique et de lâarsenal conceptuel de la thĂ©orie littĂ©raire moderne. A ce double titre, il figure comme une Ă©tape essentielle et reconnue dans le dĂ©veloppement de cette discipline comme « science » autonome. Toutefois, on sait aussi que le Formalisme russe nâa jamais opĂ©rĂ© en tant quâĂ©cole ou mouvement unifiĂ©Â : le terme dĂ©note un ensemble de travaux et de personnalitĂ©s au demeurant trĂšs divers. MalgrĂ© leur fĂ©conditĂ© conceptuelle et leur souci de fonder une thĂ©orie systĂ©matique de lâanalyse littĂ©raire, les formalistes russes nâont pas non plus formulĂ© un corps de doctrine spĂ©cifique ou bien dĂ©fini. Surtout, la plupart des idĂ©es formalistes ont Ă©tĂ© trĂšs tĂŽt vivement critiquĂ©es pour leur manque de rigueu. Le modĂšle formaliste a ainsi vite Ă©tĂ© remplacĂ© par un paradigme plus puissant, celui de la linguistique structurale.
Les interprĂštes du Formalisme russe (Victor Erlich, Aage Hansen-Löve, Tsvetan Todorov, etc.) ont tous rĂ©solu le paradoxe que reprĂ©sente son originalitĂ© et son influence dâune part, ses Ă©videntes lacunes dâautre part en suggĂ©rant que les contributions formalistes n’ont constituĂ© de fait qu’une phase transitoire ou « inter-paradigmatique » (Steiner 1984, p.10) dans lâĂ©volution de la thĂ©orie littĂ©raire. Par ailleurs, ils sâaccordent sur le fait non seulement que lâĂ©volution de la thĂ©orie littĂ©raire formaliste, sous lâĂ©gide en particulier de Roman Jakobson, sâest faite clairement dans la direction et avec lâappui du paradigme structuraliste, mais aussi que cette Ă©volution a assurĂ© sa pĂ©rennitĂ© et son influence. Ces deux conclusions, en elles-mĂȘmes, sont parfaitement justifiĂ©es: il est incontestable que les intuitions fondatrices des formalistes russes quant aux propriĂ©tĂ©s du phĂ©nomĂšne littĂ©raire et des mĂ©thodes de son analyse ont Ă©tĂ© pour lâessentiel rĂ©cupĂ©rĂ©es avec succĂšs dâabord dans le contexte du Cercle Linguistique de Prague, du structuralisme tchĂšque (Jan MukaĆovskĂœ, Felix VodiÄka), puis, bien entendu, du structuralisme français (Todorov, Barthes, etc.). De mĂȘme, l’Ćuvre de Tynjanov dĂ©montre aussi sans lâombre dâun doute que la transition vers le structuralisme a Ă©tĂ© dĂ©libĂ©rĂ©ment voulue et a dĂ©butĂ© Ă lâintĂ©rieur mĂȘme de la mouvance formaliste (cf. Ehlers 1992). Read more ›
Els Elffers
University of Amsterdam
What do Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), Jacques van Ginneken (1877-1945), Ernst Cassirer (1894-1945) and Martinus Langeveld (1905-1989) have in common?
Apart from the fact that they were all men, prominent scholars, and active in the first half of the 20th century, there seem to be few common features at first sight. Wundt was a pioneer German psychologist, Van Ginneken was a well-known Dutch linguist, Cassirer was a famous German neo-Kantian philosopher, and the Dutchman Langeveld was one of the founders of pedagogy as a scientific discipline.
However, they shared one interest: language, and its relation to thought. In Wundtâs most famous work, the ten-volume Völkerpsychologie, two volumes are devoted to language and its psychological foundations. For Van Ginneken, this issue was the central theme of his internationally recognized Principes de linguistique psychologique. Also Cassirerâs three-volume Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen deals with this theme and is regarded as his most original work. Finally, Langeveld started his successful career with his influential thesis Taal en denken (Language and thought), written when he was still a language teacher, which explains why he connects the theme to problems of language education at secondary schools.[1]
What is more, the positions of the four scholars in the contemporary language-and-thought debate are similar. In very general terms, this debate concerned the transition from sensualism to intentionalism.
According to sensualism, mental life mainly consists of representations and associations, all based upon sense data and internal sensations; language exteriorizes mental life, so meanings are mainly equated with successive representations. This view became prominent in the 18th century and, despite criticism (for example by Humboldt), it continued during the whole 19th century. Condillac, Steinthal and Paul are well-known defenders. From the end of the 19th century onwards, this view was gradually abandoned in favor of a more active view of mental life. Meanings of words and sentences were no longer seen as purely representational. As their mental counterparts, more complex volitional acts were assumed. Initially these acts were conceived as purely intra-psychical. Later on, genuine intentional acts were assumed: acts not definable solely in terms of internal occurrences in the speakerâs mind, but also in terms of their purpose, their appeal to the listener, and, moreover, in terms of their being about objects and states-of-affairs. The work of Marty and especially BĂŒhler exemplifies this transition. BĂŒhlerâs famous triangular organon-model can be regarded as the pinnacle of this development: linguistic signs are not only symptoms, expressing the speakerâs mental state, but also purposeful signals, appealing to the listener, and symbols, representing external objects and states of affairs (BĂŒhler 1990 [1934]: 34).
The four scholars all participated in this general transition, each in his own way. They took steps away from sensualism, and towards a more active and intentionalist view of mental life and linguistic semantics. But the main reason why I focus on these four scholars is that they all exhibit remarkable and similar ideas about special, allegedly âlower-levelâ types of language and thought; for example the language and thought of small children, of so-called primitive people, or of mentally deficient people. The language and thought of these groups is described in purely sensualistic terms.
This is somewhat surprising: the four scholars all regard non-sensualistic features as essential for human language and thought in general. At the same time there appears to be residual sensualism in their description of these special types of human language: sensualism for dummies.[2]
How did they defend these seemingly paradoxical views?
History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences 