Otto Jespersen and progress in international language

Posted on 15 May 2013 by James McElvenny — 10 Comments

James McElvenny
University of Sydney

When it comes to expressing the ideas of our own day, the deficiencies of classical Latin appear with ruthless clarity: telephones and motor-cars and wireless have no room in Ciceronian Latin, and it will be of little use to coin Neolatin words for these and other inventions, for the whole structure of the language with its intricate forms and complex syntax, which tempts the writer to twisted sentences, has become so utterly antiquated that we of the twentieth century wince at the idea of having to clothe our thoughts in that garb.
(Jespersen 1928:19)

Otto Jespersen (immediate source: University of Warwick)

These are the words with which Danish linguist Otto Jespersen (1860–1943) rejected contemporary proposals to revive Latin as a language of international communication. Overcoming the curse of Babel was a problem that greatly exercised Jespersen, as it did numerous other scholars, scientists and enthusiastic amateurs in this period. Jespersen’s eventual solution, NOVIAL (Nov [= new] International Auxiliary Language; Jespersen 1928:52), was a design for a new, constructed language, optimised for ease of learning and efficiency in expression, the embodiment of his well-known views on ‘Progress in language’.¹

Greetings from the Orient: H.W. Ludolf as a central figure in 17th-cent. language study

Posted on 8 May 2013 by beo — 1 Comment

Han Lamers (Leiden) & Toon Van Hal (Leuven)
Leiden University and University of Leuven

This post takes the reader to Ottoman Smyrna (Izmir in present-day Turkey) and Constantinople (now Istanbul) about 1700 A.D. Almost 250 years before, the Eastern-Roman, or Byzantine, empire had fallen into the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Sources about the socio-cultural and linguistic situation of the Greeks during this period of Tourkokratia or ‘Turkish rule’ (1453–1821) are fairly scarce. Hence, historians are much indebted to western archives and travel reports of westerners who visited the Greek world during this period.

It is, therefore, of some interest to read through a small bunch of letters written at the end of the 17^th century about the linguistic situation of Smyrna and Constantinople. The letters suggest that Smyrna is dominantly Greek and Turkish linguistically speaking. Constantinople, on the other hand, is a Babel of different voices:
Read more ›

Tagged with: 17th century, Anatolia, Germany, history, Ludolf
Posted in 17th century, Anatolia, Article, Germany, History

On the history of the question of whether natural language is “illogical”

Posted on 1 May 2013 by Barbara H Partee — 10 Comments

Barbara H Partee
University of Massachusetts Amherst

There have been centuries of study of logic and of language. Some philosophers and logicians have argued that natural language is logically deficient, or even that “natural language has no logic”. And before the birth of formal semantics in the late 1960’s, most linguists and philosophers were agreed that there was a considerable mismatch between the syntactic structure of natural language sentences and their “logical form”. The logician and philosopher Richard Montague argued that natural languages do have a very systematic semantic structure, but that it can be understood only if one uses a rich enough logic to mirror the rich syntactic structure of natural languages. This essay briefly sketches the history of arguments about the relation between natural language syntax and logical structure, concentrating on the period from Frege to Montague, roughly 1880 to 1970, illustrating the issues with sentences containing quantifiers.

Gabelentz — Grammatiker einer Sprache ohne Grammatik

Posted on 24 April 2013 by Kennosuke Ezawa — 6 Comments

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

In der Wissenschaft gilt ein Modell von dem Gegegenstand, der erklärt werden soll, nur solange, bis es nicht mehr taugt.

Bei der so genannten Chomskyschen Revolution in der Linguistik Mitte der 1950-er Jahre ging es darum, nach dem Versagen der strukturellen Beschreibung der Sprache im Bereich der Syntax den Gesichtspunkt umzukehren und vom intuitiven Wissen des Sprechers und Hörers auszugehen und die Erzeugung statt der Beschreibung von Sätzen als „generatives“ Modell der Grammatik einzuführen.

Georg von der Gabelentz, der 1881 seine „Chinesische Grammatik“ vorlegte, ging es darum, die chinesische Sprache als Gegenstand der Grammatik erst zu erschließen, nachdem die damaligen, an den indogermanischen Sprachen orientierten Sprachwissenschaftler versagt hatten, es zu tun, weil dieser Sprache morphologische Elemente (Deklinations- und Konjugationsformen u. a.), an denen sie sich sonst in der grammatischen Beschreibung einer Sprache orientierten, gänzlich fehlten. „Eine Sprache ohne Grammatik“ sollte eine Grammatik erhalten.

Tagged with: 19th century, Chinese, Gabelentz, Germany, grammar, history
Posted in 19th century, Article, Germany, History

Philosophy of linguistics: the phenomenological perspective

Posted on 17 April 2013 by Lei Zhu — 5 Comments

Lei Zhu
Shanghai International Studies University

Philosophy of linguistics is a special branch of the philosophy of science which focuses on linguistics, the scientific study of language. It was formally established in the last decades of the 20th century after the Chomskyan revolution, and has been under the influence of analytic philosophy since then. Its concern for the foundations of linguistics, however, is not unique to analytic philosophy, but is shared by phenomenology, although discussions on linguistics in the latter tradition are scattered in various works and almost never appear under the title ‘philosophy of linguistics’. The following is a very brief summary of what phenomenologists have contributed to the philosophical understanding of linguistics.

Tagged with: linguistics, phenomenology, philosophy
Posted in Article, Phenomenology, Philosophy

Program April–July

Posted on 17 April 2013 by The Editor — 6 Comments

Welcome to History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences! This is a new blog devoted to exploring and promoting the incredible diversity that exists in the study of language, both in the past and today. We publish a new post every Wednesday, with an invitation to all readers to join in the discussion through comments. Our program for the first fourteen weeks can be seen below. To find out more about us, see our ‘About’ text (in English, French and German).

We are now preparing our second program, for the period July–September. If you would like to write a post for us in this period, please get in touch. Our contact details and guidelines are included in the ‘About’ text.

Posted in Programs

Otto Jespersen and progress in international language

Greetings from the Orient: H.W. Ludolf as a central figure in 17th-cent. language study

On the history of the question of whether natural language is “illogical”

Gabelentz — Grammatiker einer Sprache ohne Grammatik

Philosophy of linguistics: the phenomenological perspective

Program April–July

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