Historical Chinese phonology as a meeting ground for the Indian, the Chinese, and the Western linguistic tradition

Posted on 4 September 2013 by Lei Zhu — Leave a comment

Lei Zhu
Shanghai International Studies University

The speech sound, being the most important medium between our physical body and linguistic mind, is one of human beings’ oldest objects of study. In different cultures, it has been understood in different ways, depending on the role it plays in social life (e.g. in religious activities), the technologies available, the dominant philosophy, and various other factors. If we take the position that each writing system is a preliminary analysis of the speech sound, even more varieties may be considered.

The above having been said, one might assume that the Chinese, with a long history, an autonomous culture, and a unique writing system, must have a rather independent tradition in the study of the speech sound. Indeed, this is the belief of many Chinese scholars as well, to whom the fact that speech sound study (yinyunxue 音韻學, literally “pronunciation and rhyme study”) makes one of the three branches of the “basic learning” (xiaoxue 小學, somewhat similar to the Western trivium) in traditional Chinese scholarship and played a leading part in its culmination during the Qing Dynasty (1616-1911, the last Chinese dynasty) is enough to support the view.

In this post, I will show that the above view is at least partly wrong. At the heart of the speech-sound branch of the “basic learning,” a tension between the Chinese and the Indian approach has existed since the 2^nd century A.D. Moreover, as the branch started to be modernised at the beginning of the 20^th century, since which time it has been customarily called “historical Chinese phonology” (hanyu lishi yinyunxue 漢語歷史音韻學), the tension has been further complicated by the introduction of the Western approach. Throughout the process, the Chinese approach has never been really dominant, but it has never been dispensable, either. This poses a problem for those who argue for the independence of traditional Chinese scholarship, because “speech sound study” is regarded as a core component of the scholarship (in much the same way as philology is the basis for classical studies). On the other hand, this is also problematic for the modern linguists, who often feel that the modernisation of historical Chinese phonology is not enough.

Tagged with: China, chinese phonology, chinese scholarship, Europe, fanqie, history of linguistics, India, phonology, rhyme study, Western
Posted in Article, China, Europe, History, India, Linguistics, Phonology

Authenticity and the correction of errors in the context of language reclamation

Posted on 28 August 2013 by Rob Amery — 2 Comments

Rob Amery
University of Adelaide

Introduction

Most languages spoken in the world today have an unbroken tradition. Languages like English, Japanese, Navajo and Pitjantjatjara have been passed on from generation to generation without intervention. Children in Ernabella, for instance, are born into a Pitjantjatjara-speaking society. They grow up immersed in the language and acquire the ability to speak Pitjantjatjara in much the same way that children born into an English-speaking family acquire English as a first language. From the viewpoint of a linguist, there is no question as to what is ‘correct’ Pitjantjatjara or ‘correct’ English. ‘Correct’ Pitjantjatjara are those varieties of Pitjantjatjara spoken by native speakers. ‘Correct’ English is that spoken by native speakers. Whilst the majority of English speakers in the world today are second language speakers, we would not hold up their English as an example of ‘correct’ English.

Reclaimed languages, by definition, are quite different. Reclaimed languages, such as Kaurna, have been constructed in the absence of native speakers. In this paper, I am most interested in pursuing ideas behind the notions of authenticity and ‘correctness’ as they apply to a reclaimed language, such as Kaurna, which is being revived and re-introduced on the basis of 19^th century written documentation, primarily that of two missionaries of the Dresden Mission Society, Christian GottlobTeichelmann and Clamor Willhelm Schürmann. Their publications and manuscripts — principally Teichelmann & Schürmann (1840), henceforth T&S; Teichelmann (1857), henceforth TMs; and Teichelmann (1858) — are the foundation for ‘reclaimed Kaurna’ as we shall refer to the language that is learned and spoken today in Adelaide, South Australia.

Otto Neurath’s Isotype and his philosophy of language

Posted on 21 August 2013 by James McElvenny — 1 Comment

James McElvenny
University of Sydney

The public image of the Vienna Circle, a group of thinkers active in Vienna in the 1920s and 30s (see Haller 1993; Stadler 2001[1997]), was characterised by a near-fanatical faith in ‘scientific’ thinking. In their manifesto (Verein Ernst Mach 2006[1929]), they declared their devotion to the wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung (scientific world conception) as the answer to ‘metaphysics’, a label they used for any philosophy that fell short of their scientific ideals. This was not simply an academic project, but also an effort to improve society and everyday life: their goal was ‘to fashion tools of thought for the everyday, not only for the everyday of scholars, but also for the everyday of all who in whatever way are involved in consciously working to shape our lives’ (ibid.:10-11).¹

Among those leading the charge in this combative and politically engaged approach to philosophy was Otto Neurath (1882-1945). In the Circle’s internal debates he advocated a radical naturalistic epistemology, centred around a progressively refined form of our everyday language. His radicalism led him to denounce as ‘metaphysics’ even some theories — too abstract for his liking — that were espoused within the Circle itself (see, e.g., Reisch 2005:8; Cartwright et al. 1996:5-6). With his various political activities, he contributed greatly to marking out a place for the Circle in the contemporary political landscape (see chapter 10 of Haller 1993; Cartwright et al 1996). At the confluence of Neurath’s philosophical and political endeavours lay his project Isotype, a system of diagrammatic representation, originally designed to convey statistical information, but which in later years came to be marketed as an ‘international picture language’.

Der Artikel ist keine ‘Wortart’! Zur synthetischen Grammatik von Sekiguchi

Posted on 14 August 2013 by Kennosuke Ezawa — Leave a comment

Kennosuke Ezawa
Ost-West-Gesellschaft für Sprach- und Kulturforschung, Berlin

Die Linguistik war lange nicht zur Erkenntnis dessen gekommen, was durch den Artikel geschieht, wenn er verwendet wird.

„Allheit“ ist bekanntlich ein Inhalt, der im Deutschen mit dem sogenannten bestimmten Artikel realisiert werden kann: Der Mensch ist sterblich.

Der Inhalt „Allheit“ kann jedoch, wie Gabelentz zeigt (G. v. d. Gabelentz: Die Sprachwissenschaft, 1891: 98, 1901: 95), nicht nur mit dem bestimmten, sondern auch mit dem unbestimmten und dem Null-Artikel, aber auch mit verschiedenen anderen Mitteln (wie jed-er, all-e, insgesamt usw.) im Deutschen ausgedrückt werden:
Read more ›

Tagged with: Article, Artikel, Georg von der Gabelentz, semantics, syntax, synthetische Grammatik, Tsugio Sekiguchi
Posted in Article, Linguistics, Semantics, Syntax

Linguists choosing the wrong side: Jacob van Ginneken and other alleged Nazi collaborators

Posted on 7 August 2013 by beo — 4 Comments

Toon Van Hal
University of Leuven

Unlike the other posts to this blog, the present post is not intended as a contribution to learning. Its sole ambition is to open a discussion on a rather sensitive topic (which is not my own field of specialization). How do, or should, we deal today with linguists having chosen the ‘wrong’ side in the Second World War? The question came to my mind when I was reading Jac. van Ginneken under fire [“Jac. van Ginneken onder vuur”], the Dutch doctoral dissertation defended one year ago by Gerrold van der Stroom at the Free University of Amsterdam (Van der Stroom 2012). In English its subtitle reads “on contemporary and postwar criticism of the linguist J.J.A. Van Ginnekens S.J. (1877-1945)”. In the Interwar Period, Van Ginneken ‒ professor at the Dutch Catholic University of Nijmegen from its 1923 foundation onward ‒ was a visionary and unconventional linguist, being prominently present on the European scene. Not only was he a trained scholar in Indo-European linguistics, he also tried to join linguistics with psychology, sociology and genetics in a truly interdisciplinary way. In the last year of the War Van Ginneken died of a brain tumor, and his intellectual legacy (almost) died with him. During and after the War Van Ginneken’s reputation suffered from his alleged sympathy for the German occupiers. The very fact that Van Ginneken had shown a profound interest for the interconnection between linguistics and biology made him suspect, not to say ridiculous, in the eyes of a later generation of scholars. Van der Stroom, a former employee of the Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in English), argues in great detail that many of these accusations cannot be substantiated.

Tagged with: 20th century, history, Jacob van Ginneken, linguistics, Nazi ideology
Posted in 20th century, Article, History, Linguistics

Rethinking the history of the Aryan paradigm

Posted on 24 July 2013 by chutton2013 — 3 Comments

Christopher Hutton
University of Hong Kong

My involvement with this topic began when I observed that the notion of a superior ‘Aryan race’, which functions in the English-speaking world as a near-universal shorthand for Nazi ideology, has no clear counterpart in the actual theories of Nazi ideologues. The term arische Rasse (‘Aryan race’) is not to be found in Nazi-era sources; the term used is arisches Volk (‘Aryan people’). In fact both academics and officials in the Nazi state rejected categorically the idea that ‘Aryan’ could be used to designate a racial identity. While the term arisch had immense ideological power in the public sphere in Germany between 1933 and 1945, it belonged, as far as race theorists were concerned, to the study of language and culture (Hutton 2005). The use of the phrase ‘Aryan race’ in English language sources derives from translating Volk (‘people’) as ‘race’, and then reading into the translated term ‘race’ a form of bio-racial essentialism. While ‘race’ (Rasse) was indeed a central concept in Nazi Germany, its actual status, and relationship to the concept of Volk, was the subject of complex and contentious debate. Despite the ubiquity of the term, the history of the Aryan paradigm has yet to be written. The most comprehensive guide to the early textual history of the term ‘Aryan’ remains that produced by a Nazi scholar, Hans Siegert (1941/42), but over the past twenty-five years a series of detailed intellectual histories and themed volumes that touch on the Aryan question have been published.¹The issue here however is not simply the correcting of a misleading translation or the creation of a historical narrative, but the reconceptualization of the Aryan paradigm, and, as a corollary, the political history of linguistic theorizing.

Tagged with: Aryan, Germany, history of linguistics, Nazi ideology, race, Volk
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, Article, Germany, History, Linguistics

Program July-October 2013

Posted on 19 July 2013 by The Editor — Leave a comment

[Program updated 30 July 2013]

24 July	Rethinking the history of the Aryan paradigm Christopher Hutton University of Hong Kong
31 July	Break
7 August	Linguists choosing the wrong side: Jacob van Ginneken and other alleged Nazi collaborators Toon Van Hal University of Leuven
14 August	Der Artikel ist keine ‘Wortart’! Zur synthetischen Grammatik von Sekiguchi Kennosuke Ezawa Ost-West-Gesellschaft für Sprach- und Kulturforschung, Berlin
21 August	Otto Neurath’s Isotype and his philosophy of language James McElvenny University of Sydney
28 August	Authenticity and the correction of errors in the context of language reclamation Rob Amery Kaurna Warra Pintyanthi and University of Adelaide
4 September	Historical Chinese phonology as a meeting ground for the Indian, the Chinese, and the Western linguistic tradition Lei Zhu Shanghai International Studies University
11 September	From inductivism to structuralism: the ‘method of residues’ goes to the field Michael Silverstein University of Chicago
18 September	No beetle? Wittgenstein’s ‘grammatical illusions’ and Dalabon emotion metaphors Maïa Ponsonnet Australian National University and Dynamique du Langage (CNRS/Université Lyon 2)
25 September	The social cognition of linguists Andrea Schalley Griffith University
2 October	Emile Benveniste et les langues amérindiennes Chloé Laplantine Laboratoire d’histoire des théories linguistiques, Université Paris-Diderot

Tagged with: programs
Posted in Programs

Do linguists measure anything?

Posted on 17 July 2013 by nickriemer — 3 Comments

Nick Riemer
University of Sydney and Laboratoire d’histoire des théories linguistiques, Université Paris-Diderot

Few questions in linguistics can be as hoary, fundamental or, perhaps, as unsatisfactorily handled, as that of the discipline’s empirical status – a question typically presented as one of linguistics’ ‘scientificity’. Among the many issues needing attention from anyone who wants to make a serious epistemological effort to clarify the character of linguistic theory, one in particular has received strikingly little discussion: the presence (or nonpresence) in linguistics of measurement.

Measurement couldn’t be more central to canonical sciences: theories are characteristically formulated in mathematical terms, and contain hypotheses about quantified data, a situation which naturally presupposes the measurement of the base phenomena (see Kuhn 1961 for a fascinating explosion of ‘myths’ about measurement in physics). In linguistics – or, at least, in the core theoretical domains of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics – measurement comparable to that observed in the empirical sciences plays no obvious role. That, presumably, is the reason for the ambient silence about the topic. But could there be some more subtle respect in which theoretical linguistics does, after all, involve something analogous to measurement?

This question isn’t without interest, since it forms part of the comparatively neglected methodological side of the question of the scientificity of linguistics – taking ‘science’, of course, in its typical English sense, and not in the broader sense captured by German Wissenschaft. As everyone now knows, there’s no straightforward criterion of the ‘scientific’: just what qualifies something as a science, in fact, is – fortunately – a subject of debate (see the useful Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy entry). One thing, though, should be clear: it’s not enough for a discipline to count as a science that it simply have an empirical object. This, however, is typically the implicit grounds of linguists’ protestations about the scientificity of their discipline: languages are empirical objects, and the linguist studies them in the same way that other scientists study other empirical objects.

Tagged with: philosophy of linguistics, science, scientificity, scientism, semantics
Posted in Article, Linguistics, Philosophy, Semantics

Early writing and printing in the Philippines

Posted on 10 July 2013 by rebecafr — 10 Comments

Rebeca Ferndández Rodríguez
Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro

Printing and publishing began in the Philippines with the arrival of the Spanish in 1565. Encountering an enormous number of native languages, the Spaniards felt a pressing need to describe the languages most commonly spoken in the archipelago in order to communicate with the Filipinos. With the establishment of Spanish sovereignty over the Philippines, the Spanish Crown issued several contradictory laws regarding language. The missionaries were urged to learn the vernacular languages but were subsequently required to teach Spanish. For this reason, missionaries learnt the Philippine languages by writing vocabularies, grammars, and catechisms.

Philippine linguistic writing – grammars and vocabularies – is extensive and exhaustive. There was a pre-Hispanic writing system in the Philippines, baybayin, but it was used for personal communication and not for recording literature or history. For this reason missionaries had to start from the beginning. By describing the languages they contributed to their survival. In the last decades scholars have studied manuscripts and early editions of Tagalog, Bisaya and Ilocano texts and have been re-editing them. This is the case for Arte y reglas de la lengua tagala (1610) by Francisco Blancas de San José (1560–1614) edited by Quilis in 1997; Bocabulario de lengua bisaya, hiligueyna y Haraya de la isla de Panay y Sugbu y para las demas islas (1632) by Alonso de Méntrida (1559–1637) edited by García–Medall in 2004; and Arte de la lengua japona (1732), Tagalysmo elucidado (1742) and “Arte chínico” (1742) by Melchor Oyanguren de Santa Inés (1688–1747), edited by Zwartjes (2010). There is also an unpublished PhD dissertation about the Calepino ylocano (ca. 1797) of Pedro Vivar (1730–1771) and Andrés Carro (?–1806) by Fernández Rodríguez (2012).

Tagged with: 16th century, history, Philippines, printing, Spain, writing
Posted in 16th century, 17th century, 18th century, Article, History, Philippines

Historical and moral arguments for language reclamation

Posted on 26 June 2013 by Ghil'ad Zuckermann — 15 Comments

Ghil‘ad Zuckermann
University of Adelaide

Language is an archaeological vehicle, full of the remnants of dead and living pasts, lost and buried civilizations and technologies. The language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.
Russell Hoban (children’s writer, 1925-2011 – cf. Haffenden 1985: 138)

Introduction

Linguicide (language killing) and glottophagy (language eating) have made Australia an unlucky country. These twin forces have been in operation in Australia since the early colonial period, when efforts were made to prevent Aboriginal people from continuing to speak their language, in order to ‘civilize’ them. Anthony Forster, a nineteenth-century financier and politician, gave voice to a colonial linguicide ideology, which was typical of much of the attitude towards Australian languages (Report on a public meeting of the South Australian Missionary Society in aid of the German Mission to the Aborigines, Southern Australian, 8 September 1843, p. 2, cf. Scrimgeour 2007: 116):

The natives would be sooner civilized if their language was extinct. The children taught would afterwards mix only with whites, where their own language would be of no use – the use of their language would preserve their prejudices and debasement, and their language was not sufficient to express the ideas of civilized life.

Even Governor of South Australia George Grey, who was relatively pro-Aboriginal, appeared to partially share this opinion and remarked in his journal that ‘the ruder languages disappear successively, and the tongue of England alone is heard around’ (Grey 1841: 200-201). What was seen as a ‘civilizing’ process was actually the traumatic death of various fascinating and multifaceted Aboriginal languages.

It is not surprising therefore that out of 250 known Aboriginal languages, today only 18 (7%) are alive and kicking, i.e. spoken natively by the community children. Blatant statements of linguistic imperialism such as the ones made by Forster and Grey now seem to be less frequent, but the processes they describe are nonetheless still active, let alone if one looks at the Stolen Generations between approximately 1909 and 1969.

There are approximately 7,000 languages currently spoken worldwide. 96% of the world’s population speaks 4% of the world’s languages, leaving the vast majority of tongues vulnerable to extinction and disempowering for their speakers. Linguistic diversity reflects many things beyond accidental historical splits. Languages are essential building blocks of community identity and authority. However, with globalization, homogenization and Coca-colonization there will be more and more groups added to the forlorn club of the powerless lost-heritage peoples. Language reclamation will become increasingly relevant as people seek to recover their cultural autonomy, empower their spiritual and intellectual sovereignty, and improve their wellbeing.

Revivalistics – including Revival Linguistics and Revivalomics – is a new interdisciplinary field of enquiry studying comparatively and systematically the universal constraints and global mechanisms on the one hand (see Zuckermann 2009), and particularistic peculiarities and cultural relativist idiosyncrasies on the other, apparent in linguistic revitalization attempts across various sociological backgrounds, all over the globe (Zuckermann & Walsh 2011).

Historical Chinese phonology as a meeting ground for the Indian, the Chinese, and the Western linguistic tradition

Authenticity and the correction of errors in the context of language reclamation

Introduction

Otto Neurath’s Isotype and his philosophy of language

Der Artikel ist keine ‘Wortart’! Zur synthetischen Grammatik von Sekiguchi

Linguists choosing the wrong side: Jacob van Ginneken and other alleged Nazi collaborators

Rethinking the history of the Aryan paradigm

Program July-October 2013

Do linguists measure anything?

Early writing and printing in the Philippines

Historical and moral arguments for language reclamation

Introduction

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