New dating of the Iloko manuscript lexicography

Posted on 11 December 2013 by rebecafr — 2 Comments

Rebeca Fernández Rodríguez
Centro de Estudos em Letras (CEL)
Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD)

Missionary lexicography in the Philippines is extensive and exhaustive. Dozens of grammars and vocabularies have been written since the Spanish arrival in the Philippines in 1565. In many cases they have remained in manuscript form. However, in the last decade, some scholars have focused their research on specific languages and documents. Quilis edited Blancas de San José’s Arte y Reglas de la lengua Tagala (1661) in 1991; García-Medall edited Alonso de Méntrida’s Diccionario de la lengua bisaya, hiligueina y haraya de la Isla de Panay in 2004; Zwartjes edited Melchor Oyanguren’s Tagalysmo elucidado (1742) in 2010; and I am working on an edition of manuscript Calepino Ilocano.

Even though there is an increasing number of papers and books on Philippine linguistic documentation, there is no study on how dictionaries were compiled and finally printed. Missionaries worked on previous dictionaries, improving them by making amendments, adding new terms and examples. Authorship was not regarded as it is today. Grammars and dictionaries were kept in libraries or passed from hand to hand and were constantly improved.

So we might ask what work Spanish missionaries in the Philippines did on their field notes to prepare printed dictionaries. We can begin to answer this question by looking at three different Ilocano manuscripts kept in the Library of the Estudio Teológico Agustiniano de Valladolid (Spain) and comparing them to the first printed Ilocano dictionary of 1849. Read more ›

Tagged with: Ilocano, lexicography, Philippine
Posted in 17th century, 18th century, Article, Europe, Field linguistics, Lexicography, Linguistics, Philippines

Bloomfield : Du mentalisme au behaviorisme

Posted on 4 December 2013 by jeanmfort — 1 Comment

Jean-Michel Fortis
Laboratoire d’histoire des théories linguistiques, Université Paris-Diderot

On peut s’interroger sur l’évolution qui voit Bloomfield passer de la psychologie à dominante wundtienne, qui imprègne son Introduction de 1914, au behaviorisme, et d’une linguistique “mentaliste” à une linguistique psycho-abstinente et centrée sur l’analyse des formes. Une version simple de cette évolution est celle que décrit Langendoen (1998): de conceptualiste, Bloomfield devient behavioriste et structuraliste.

Je voudrais donner ici une image plus complexe de cette transition, en insistant sur le découplage entre la conversion au behaviorisme et l’évolution des idées linguistiques de Bloomfield. Cette évolution est à mon avis graduelle, et entretient des rapports complexes avec la psychologie de l’époque (celle de Wundt, essentiellement, mais aussi de Hermann Paul). Trois examples, qui sont autant de rapports à la psychologie, peuvent l’illustrer.

Dans un premier cas, Bloomfield donne un soubassement psychologique à des phénomènes linguistiques, pour n’en garder que ce qui est compatible avec des critères distributionnels d’analyse. Ici, le mentalisme embraye la discussion, donne un fondement psychologique à l’explication, pour se trouver recyclé en approche distributionnelle. La discussion partira de ce que dit Bloomfield à propos de la distinction analytique / synthétique.

Un autre cas concerne la réinterprétation par Bloomfield de l’analyse wundtienne de la proposition. En l’occurrence, dès l’Introduction de 1914, Bloomfield reprend Wundt en l’édulcorant, c’est-à-dire en restant plus près des formes de surface que Wundt. L’origine de l’analyse en constituants peut donc être cherchée chez Wundt, mais chez un Wundt en partie dépsychologisé.

Enfin, dans un troisième type de cas, la psychologie mentaliste ne joue qu’un rôle insignifiant dans la description linguistique, et ce à l’époque même où Bloomfield défend une linguistique psychologique. Ce cas est illustré par les précoces Tagalog Texts (1917).

Bien sûr, il ne s’agit pas ici de présenter Bloomfield et son évolution, mais de donner quelques coups de sonde historiques dans certains domaines. Read more ›

Tagged with: behaviourism, history of structuralism, Leonard Bloomfield, linguistics, mentalism, psychology, Wilhelm Wundt
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, America, Article, History, Linguistics, Structuralism

El Sermonario de fray Bernardino de Sahagún y los fondos en lenguas indígenas de la Biblioteca Nacional de México

Posted on 27 November 2013 by rebecafr — 1 Comment

Pilar Máynez
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Sobre el repositorio que resguarda la versión tardía del Sermonario de los Sanctos del año en lengua mexicana

La Biblioteca Nacional de México fue oficialmente inaugurada el 2 de abril de 1884 en la antigua iglesia de San Agustín y el 16 de diciembre de 1967 pasó a formar parte del recientemente creado Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas, perteneciente a la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Dicho repositorio que constituye, sin duda, el más importante de México por el número de volúmenes y por la relevancia de los mismos, contiene igualmente una de las colecciones más valiosas sobre incunables, libros raros y archivos especiales en su Fondo Reservado; éste alberga alrededor de cuatro mil volúmenes, correspondientes al periodo comprendido entre los siglos XV al XX,[i] dentro de los que se incluyen invaluables manuscritos en lenguas indígenas.

Aunque no se cuenta aún con la bibliografía completa de los textos escritos en el tan amplio mosaico de lenguas indomexicanas, los catálogos realizados por Ángel María Garibay y Roberto Moreno de los Arcos[ii] constituyen una importante aproximación al mencionado acervo. Moreno de los Arcos, por su parte, atendiendo a la información proporcionada por García Icazbalceta y su continuador Agustín Millares Carlo, asegura que, sólo en lo que respecta al siglo XVI, tenemos como existencia comprobada 179 obras, de las cuales 30 están escritas en náhuatl o mexicano y 50 en otras lenguas indígenas, mientras que de “85 consta su existencia, 15 en lengua náhuatl y 38 en otras lenguas” (1966:27).

Garibay y Moreno de los Arcos destacan, entre las obras que custodia el Fondo Reservado, varias de carácter doctrinal escritas en náhuatl que merecen ser estudiadas como testimonio lingüístico e intercultural. Se trata de textos, algunos de ellos aún inexplorados, que mucho pueden abonar en lo que desde hace varias décadas se ha denominado Lingüística Misionera. Figura, por ejemplo, con signatura 1628 bis, el manuscrito titulado Cantares Mexicanos y otros opúsculos que publicará próximamente la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, en su totalidad, en edición crítica y bilingüe. También el Fondo Reservado preserva otras obras como son las Domínicas en mexicano, de autor desconocido (Ms. 1478), y el manuscrito 1476 correspondiente a santorales con algunos refranes y fábulas escritos por diferentes manos. A continuación nos abocaremos a una de ellas. Read more ›

Tagged with: 15th-century, history, Mexico, Náhuatl, Spain
Posted in 15th century, 16th century, America, Article, Europe, History, Linguistics

Toponymy and ecolinguistics

Posted on 13 November 2013 by joshuanash — 2 Comments

Joshua Nash
University of Adelaide

Ecolinguistics can be divided into two strands. The first deals with environmental discourse analysis, often termed eco-critical discourse analysis, critical ecolinguistics, or the language of ecology and environmentalism, while the second, language ecology, which deals with interactions between humans, mind, and environment, is often expressed through lexico-grammatical studies of how humans talk about and adapt linguistically to new and foreign environments. This second strand is also referred to as the ecology of language. I will not be overly concerned with the first strand.

Since its beginnings in the 1980s and 1990s, ecolinguistics has grown into a research field in its own right, although the boundaries of what ecolinguistic analysis is and how one should go about doing ecolinguistic research have not been made explicit by scholars working in the field. The linguistic community has also questioned the relevance of ecolinguistics as a subdiscipline and on what theoretical ground ecolinguistics actually stands (e.g. Edwards 2008; Ostler 2001; Owen 2004). There have also been several critical voices concerning various aspects of ecolinguistic research (e.g. Goddard 1996; Siegel 1997). With the exception of Garner (2005), scholars and theoreticians have not been explicit enough in stating the theoretical breadth of ecolinguistics and its practical implications for general linguistic theory.

Ecolinguistics provides several conceptual questions. I am concerned with one major empirical question: How can relationships involving people, language, place, and names be measured empirically? Research in linguistics has generally focused on linguistic structure decontextualised from the environment in which the language is spoken. Sociolinguistic research has contributed significantly to an understanding of language use and language in social context just as ecolinguistics has created awareness of language as an ecological phenomenon (Haugen 1972).

Tagged with: ecolinguistics, toponymy
Posted in Article, Ecolinguistics, Linguistics, Toponymy

Teaching language to a boy born deaf in the seventeenth century: the Holder-Wallis debate

Posted on 6 November 2013 by jmaat — 3 Comments

Jaap Maat
University of Amsterdam

1. The Popham notebook

In the summer of 2008, a leather-bound booklet attracted the attention of a member of staff of Warner Leisure Hotels in Littlecote House, near Hungerford, Wiltshire, UK. It looked old, and in fact it was. It turned out to be a seventeenth-century notebook, filled for the most part with hand-written text. On the title page it said: “Alexander Popham, his book. Oxford, Novemb. 8. 1662”.

It soon became clear that this notebook was a fascinating find, as it promised to shed light on a famous case in the history of teaching language to the deaf. Littlecote House used to be the home of the Pophams, a wealthy family whose members were admirals and judges playing an important role in early modern political history. Alexander Popham was born deaf, and remained mute until he was about ten years old.

He then was taught, at least in part successfully, how to speak, read and write, by two teachers: first by William Holder (1616-1698), and subsequently by John Wallis (1616-1703). The recently discovered notebook is written in the hand of Wallis, Popham’s second teacher, and it is obvious from its contents that it was composed by Wallis specifically for the purpose of instructing Popham.

The case of Alexander Popham has primarily become famous for two reasons. First, although he was not the first person born deaf in Western history to succeed in acquiring command of a language of the hearing, to do so was certainly a rare and remarkable achievement. Until the sixteenth century, it was generally considered impossible to cure deafness or to find a remedy for muteness other than to have recourse to signing, which was typically seen as at best a very deficient substitute for spoken language. In 16th-century Spain, the first systematic attempts were undertaken to teach written and spoken language, in this order, to deaf-mutes (Plann, 1997). These attempts reportedly succeeded, and although Holder and Wallis must have been aware of this, they considered themselves pioneers. Secondly, both teachers of Popham afterwards claimed the credit for this success, which led to a bitter dispute between them. The dispute attracted more attention from historians than the average petty quarrel between rival scholars as it was fought out in print, and took place within the early Royal Society, involving as it did two of its prominent members, who both appealed to other fellows in support of their claims.

In what follows, I summarize the debate between Holder and Wallis before briefly returning to the Popham notebook.

Tagged with: 17th century, Alexander Popham, deaf education, Holder, Wallis
Posted in 17th century, Article, Europe, History

Hendrik Pos and the epistemological foundations of structuralism

Posted on 30 October 2013 by Patrick Flack — 3 Comments

Patrick Flack
Charles University, Prague

The name of Dutch linguist and philosopher Hendrik Josephus Pos (1898-1955) is not one that rings many bells today, except perhaps in the Netherlands and the (growing) circles of Merleau-Ponty specialists. But to the keen student of the history of the language sciences who does accidentally bump into him and decides to lend his work some attention, Pos will reveal himself as a fascinating source that offers an intriguing new perspective on the development of linguistics in the first half of the 20th century.

A uniform orthography and early linguistic research in Australia

Posted on 16 October 2013 by moored03 — 15 Comments

David Moore
University of Western Australia

Introduction

A Uniform orthography can be defined as one which is segmental and phonographic. Each graphic segment is pronounced and has a distinct value. Internal consistency in transcription is achieved by defining each segment and the sound that it represents in the orthography. Each sound of a language is assigned a segment: a letter or a combination of letters which is outlined in statement of the orthography or ‘phonetic key’. By contrast, a non-uniform writing system involves writing languages where the value of each segment is unspecified. If the language of transcription is English, there is a poor correspondence between the letter and sound. The problem is particularly acute with English vowels. The five vowel letters of English are polyvalent; that is they each represent a number of English phonemes. Ten English phonemes are represented by <a> in English (Coulmas 2003: 186). Also, each English vowel phoneme can be represented by different graphemes. The spelling may be at the word level and based on what Dench (2000:59) says is ‘subjective impression of similarity to particular English words’. Individual segments in this ‘logographic’ spelling have little or no phonetic interpretation.

Uniform orthographies were the forerunners of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The first Australianist linguist to use the IPA appears to have been John McConnell Black (1855-1951), for a language of the Western Desert (Black 1915). I claim that some early investigators of Australian languages used Uniform orthographies in their writing of Australian Aboriginal languages and avoided the problems of English-based spelling.

Program October-December 2013

Posted on 9 October 2013 by The Editor — Leave a comment

[Program updated 27 October 2013]

16 October	A uniform orthography and early linguistic research in Australia David Moore University of Western Australia
23 October	Break
30 October	Hendrik Pos and the epistemological foundations of structuralism Patrick Flack Charles University, Prague
6 November	Teaching language to a boy born deaf in the seventeenth century: the Wallis-Holder debate Jaap Maat University of Amsterdam
13 November	Toponymy and ecolinguistics Joshua Nash University of Adelaide
20 November	Break
27 November	El Sermonario de fray Bernardino de Sahagún y los fondos en lenguas indígenas de la Biblioteca Nacional de México Pilar Máynez Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
4 December	Bloomfield: du mentalisme au behaviorisme Jean-Michel Fortis Laboratoire d’histoire des théories linguistiques, Université Paris-Diderot
11 December	New dating of the Iloko manuscript lexicography Rebeca Fernández Rodríguez Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro

Tagged with: programs
Posted in Programs

Emile Benveniste et les langues amérindiennes.

Posted on 2 October 2013 by Chloé Laplantine — Leave a comment

Chloé Laplantine
Laboratoire d’Histoire des Théories Linguistiques
CNRS-Université Paris Diderot

Frances Densmore with Blackfoot chief Mountain Chief during a recording session for the BAE

Frances Densmore et le chef Blackfoot, Mountain Chief, pendant une session d’enregistrement au Bureau of American Ethnology

Les langues amérindiennes ont une place critique dans la linguistique d’Emile Benveniste (1902-1976). A deux reprises dans les Problèmes de linguistique générale, il explique l’importance pour l’histoire de la linguistique des recherches engagées à la fin du 19^e siècle, sous l’impulsion de Franz Boas peut-on supposer, parce qu’elles mènent le linguiste à se faire l’analyste de son propre regard, de ses propres catégories de langue-pensée comme non-universelles, pour finalement devenir capable d’une analyse des langues. Ainsi Benveniste, en 1968, dans un entretien avec Pierre Daix fait ce récit :

Vers 1900, des hommes, et tout particulièrement des Américains, ont dit : « Vos conceptions sont irréelles ou, en tout cas, très partielles, vous ne tenez compte que d’une partie du monde linguistique : le monde indo-européen. Il y a une foule de langues qui échappent à vos catégories ». Cet avertissement a été très utile et ces langues, notamment les langues indiennes d’Amérique que j’ai personnellement étudiées, sont très instructives, parce qu’elles nous font connaître des types de catégorisation sémantique et de structure morphologique nettement différents de ceux que les linguistes formés dans la tradition classique considéraient comme inhérents à l’esprit humain[1].

The social cognition of linguists

Posted on 25 September 2013 by aschalley — Leave a comment

Andrea C. Schalley
Griffith University

It is social cognition which enables us to construct functioning societies sharing knowledge, values and goals, and to undertake collaborative action. It is also crucial to empathising and communicating with others, to enriching imprecise signs in context, to maintaining detailed, differentiated representations of the minds and feelings of those who share our social universe, to coordinating the exchanges of information that allow us to keep updating these representations, and to coopting others into action.
(Evans 2012)

What about the linguistic research community – is this a “functioning society”, to use Evans’ notion? Which knowledge, values, and goals are we (and I consider myself a member of this “society”) aiming to share? What are our goals? In this post, I will try to look at “the linguists” as a “society” and discuss whether it is “functioning” from a “social cognition” point of view. I hope that a meta-discussion on the state of linguistics may result, potentially benefitting the further progress and development of the field.