Translator proditor. The affirmation of the authorial voice in Matías Ruiz Blanco.

Posted on 30 September 2015 by roxanasarion — 1 Comment

Roxana Sarion
University of Tromsø, Norway

Matías Ruíz Blanco (1643-1705/1708?) was a Franciscan friar who served as a missionary, historian and linguist in colonial Venezuela. Born in the village of Estepa in the Spanish region of Andalusia, he was devoted from early youth to religious practice. He was most probably educated in the Convent of Grace. By the age of 23 he was already recognized as a teacher of philosophy at the Monastery of the Valley in the Province of Seville. In 1672, during the third Franciscan expedition to America, he was sent as new lector of philosophy and theology. He continued teaching until early 1675 when, together with other fourteen missionaries, he was sent to evangelize the indigenous people in the province of New Andalusia, Cumana, on the banks of the Orinoco river and in other parts of Southern Venezuela.

Johanes de Laet (Leiden, 1625) – Engraved map representing present-day North Eastern Venezuela territory with some Caribbean islands, which includes the mouth of the Orinoco river (courtesy of John Carter Brown online library)

Vivien Law Essay Prize 2015

Posted on 22 September 2015 by The Editor — Leave a comment

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/

Tagged with: announcements, Vivien Law Prize
Posted in Announcements, Conferences and workshops

Las disciplinas lingüísticas en la España decimonónica: Julián González de Soto y el Colegio de Figueras (1839-1845)

Posted on 2 September 2015 by rebecafr — Leave a comment

María José García Folgado
Universitat de València – Grupo GIEL

La historia de la enseñanza de la gramática es un campo que, en el marco hispánico, solo recientemente está siendo objeto de investigación. Aunque desde la Historiografía Lingüística 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 análisis, lo que supone, en última instancia, una interpretación sesgada de la historia gramatical. Un principio determinante en la investigación de la gramática escolar y su historia es la necesaria imbricación en el análisis de factores externos e internos que aporten datos empíricos que permitan abordar desde sus diferentes esferas el fenómeno: no solo el texto, sino el contexto; no solo la teoría gramatical, sino los supuestos didácticos 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 investigación de tres manuales escolares de gramática producidos para un centro concreto (el Instituto de Figueras), en un momento histórico de desarrollo y cambio de las enseñanzas medias en España. Read more ›

Tagged with: 19th century
Posted in Article, Europe, Grammars, Spain

John Stoddart’s The Philosophy of Language: the “last truly universalist work”

Posted on 19 August 2015 by The Editor — Leave a comment

Joseph L. Subbiondo
California Institute of Integral Studies

Introduction

Sir John Stoddart (1773-1856) served as England’s 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. Stoddart’s 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 Stoddart’s The Philosophy of Language (1861) as “the last truly universalist work” (p. 99): he recognized that Stoddart’s 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 Stoddart’s 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 ›

Tagged with: John Stoddart, universal grammar, William Hazlitt
Posted in 18th century, 19th century, Article, History, Philosophy

Esperanto: some observations of a speaker-linguist

Posted on 5 August 2015 by skywoolix — 9 Comments

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 McElvenny’s 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 – the attempt to advance Esperanto as a serious solution to the world’s “language problem” – from the sixties I favored instead an inward-turning approach: acknowledge the futility of getting the language “recognized” 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 “Esperanto salesman” (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 “keys” 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 Coulson’s Teach Yourself Sanskrit, widely used as a college textbook, is only 513 pages, and it has reading selections and a lexicon. Read more ›

Tagged with: Esperanto, Esperanto grammar
Posted in Article, Constructed languages, Linguistics

Program August-December 2015

Posted on 23 July 2015 by The Editor — Leave a comment

[Updated 16 September 2015]

5 August	Esperanto: some observations of a speaker-linguist Ken Miner University of Kansas
19 August	John Stoddart’s The Philosophy of Language: the “last truly universalist work” Joseph Subbiondo California Institute of Integral Studies
2 September	Las disciplinas lingüísticas en la España decimonónica: Julián González de Soto y el Colegio de Figueras (1839-1845) María José García Folgado Universitat de València
16 September	break
30 September	Translator proditor. The affirmation of the authorial voice in Matias Ruiz Blanco. Roxana Sarion University of Amsterdam
13 October	Family resemblance and semantics: the vagaries of a not so new concept Jean-Michel Fortis Laboratoire d’histoire des théories linguistiques, Université Paris-Diderot
28 October	Phonetische Studien – applied linguistics gets its first journal? Andrew Linn University of Sheffield
11 November	break
30 November	Antoine Meillet et les massacres d’Arménie de 1915 Sébastien Moret Université de Tartu / Université de Lausanne
9 December	Spanish language in Portuguese texts (16th to 19th centuries) Sónia Duarte Centro de Linguística da Universidade do Porto

Tagged with: programs
Posted in Programs

Salon: Anachronism in linguistic historiography

Posted on 3 June 2015 by The Editor — 5 Comments

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 ›

Tagged with: anachronism, conceptual history, Ferdinand de Saussure, linguistic historiography, Plato’s Cratylus, salon, word order
Posted in Article, History, Linguistics, Salon

Hugo Schuchardt and his Network of Knowledge

Posted on 20 May 2015 by silviomoreiradesousa — 5 Comments

Johannes Mücke & Silvio Moreira de Sousa [1]
Hugo Schuchardt Archiv, University of Graz

“Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth.”
Frank Zappa (1979)

Hugo Schuchardt (1842-1927)
Source: Hugo Schuchardt Archiv

Information:

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 Schuchardt’s publications with the also digital edition of his correspondence and a bibliography of secondary literature.

Preserved at the University’s 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 Schuchardt’s correspondence is at the moment (May 2015) around more than 2,000 edited letters. Furthermore, all of Schuchardt’s 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 ›

Tagged with: 19th century, correspondence, History of the Language Sciences, Hugo Schuchardt, Hugo Schuchardt Archiv, manuscripts, Network of Knowledge, networks, Otto Jespersen, Schuchardt, Scientific Periodicals
Posted in 19th century, Article, Europe, Linguistics

Translation as a search for divine meanings: Fray Francisco Blancas de San José and his grammar of the Tagalog language

Posted on 6 May 2015 by mjssales — 1 Comment

The frontispiece of Fray Gaspar de San Agustín's "Conquistas de las Islas Philipinas" (1698)

This frontispiece of Fray Gaspar de San Agustín’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 Andrés de Urdaneta and Fray Martín 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 instances—such 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 Tomas—that even required that interpretation be done into Filipino, with Manila archbishop Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle stepping in to provide some help.

The oldest extant grammar of Tagalog

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 ›

Tagged with: 17th century, missionary linguistics, Philippines, Tagalog, translation
Posted in 17th century, Article, History, Missionary Linguistics, Philippines, Translation

Le Formalisme russe dans l’histoire de la linguistique

Posted on 23 April 2015 by Patrick Flack — Leave a comment

Patrick Flack
sdvig press

Le Formalisme russe, à bien des égards, constitue un phénomène paradoxal. Il a, c’est bien connu, fourni les fondements d’une approche systématique de la littérature (ou du « langage poétique « ) et contribué à produire une grande partie du lexique et de l’arsenal conceptuel de la théorie littéraire moderne. A ce double titre, il figure comme une étape essentielle et reconnue dans le développement de cette discipline comme « science » autonome. Toutefois, on sait aussi que le Formalisme russe n’a jamais opéré en tant qu’école ou mouvement unifié : le terme dénote un ensemble de travaux et de personnalités au demeurant très divers. Malgré leur fécondité conceptuelle et leur souci de fonder une théorie systématique de l’analyse littéraire, les formalistes russes n’ont pas non plus formulé un corps de doctrine spécifique ou bien défini. Surtout, la plupart des idées formalistes ont été très tôt vivement critiquées pour leur manque de rigueu. Le modèle formaliste a ainsi vite été remplacé par un paradigme plus puissant, celui de la linguistique structurale.

Les interprètes du Formalisme russe (Victor Erlich, Aage Hansen-Löve, Tsvetan Todorov, etc.) ont tous résolu le paradoxe que représente son originalité et son influence d’une part, ses évidentes lacunes d’autre part en suggérant que les contributions formalistes n’ont constitué de fait qu’une phase transitoire ou « inter-paradigmatique » (Steiner 1984, p.10) dans l’évolution de la théorie littéraire. Par ailleurs, ils s’accordent sur le fait non seulement que l’évolution de la théorie littéraire formaliste, sous l’égide en particulier de Roman Jakobson, s’est faite clairement dans la direction et avec l’appui du paradigme structuraliste, mais aussi que cette évolution a assuré sa pérennité et son influence. Ces deux conclusions, en elles-mêmes, sont parfaitement justifiées: il est incontestable que les intuitions fondatrices des formalistes russes quant aux propriétés du phénomène littéraire et des méthodes de son analyse ont été pour l’essentiel récupérées avec succès d’abord dans le contexte du Cercle Linguistique de Prague, du structuralisme tchèque (Jan Mukařovský, Felix Vodička), puis, bien entendu, du structuralisme français (Todorov, Barthes, etc.). De même, l’œuvre de Tynjanov démontre aussi sans l’ombre d’un doute que la transition vers le structuralisme a été délibérément voulue et a débuté à l’intérieur même de la mouvance formaliste (cf. Ehlers 1992). Read more ›

Tagged with: 20th century, formalism, linguistique structurale, Roman Jakobson, Russian formalism, structuralism
Posted in 20th century, Article, Europe, Structuralism