Die Linguistik war lange nicht zur Erkenntnis dessen gekommen, was durch den Artikel geschieht, wenn er verwendet wird.
âAllheitâ ist bekanntlich ein Inhalt, der im Deutschen mit dem sogenannten bestimmten Artikel realisiert werden kann: Der Mensch ist sterblich.
Der Inhalt âAllheitâ 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 ausgedrĂŒckt werden: Read more ›
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 âwrongâ side in the Second World War? The question came to my mind when I was reading Jac. van Ginneken under fire[âJac. van Ginneken onder vuurâ], 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 âon contemporary and postwar criticism of the linguist J.J.A. Van Ginnekens S.J. (1877-1945)â. In the Interwar Period, Van Ginneken  â professor at the Dutch Catholic University of Nijmegen from its 1923 foundation onward â 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 Ginnekenâs 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.
My involvement with this topic began when I observed that the notion of a superior âAryan raceâ, 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 (âAryan raceâ) is not to be found in Nazi-era sources; the term used is arisches Volk (âAryan peopleâ). In fact both academics and officials in the Nazi state rejected categorically the idea that âAryanâ 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 âAryan raceâ in English language sources derives from translating Volk (âpeopleâ) as âraceâ, and then reading into the translated term âraceâ a form of bio-racial essentialism. While âraceâ (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 âAryanâ 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.1Â The 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.
Few questions in linguistics can be as hoary, fundamental or, perhaps, as unsatisfactorily handled, as that of the disciplineâs empirical status â a question typically presented as one of linguisticsâ âscientificityâ. 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 couldnât 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 âmythsâ about measurement in physics). In linguistics â or, at least, in the core theoretical domains of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics â 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 isnât without interest, since it forms part of the comparatively neglected methodological side of the question of the scientificity of linguistics â taking âscienceâ, of course, in its typical English sense, and not in the broader sense captured by German Wissenschaft. As everyone now knows, thereâs no straightforward criterion of the âscientificâ: just what qualifies something as a science, in fact, is â fortunately â a subject of debate (see the useful Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy entry). One thing, though, should be clear: itâs 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 linguistsâ 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.
Rebeca FerndĂĄndez RodrĂguez Universidade de TrĂĄs-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.
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 (childrenâs writer, 1925-2011 â 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 âcivilizeâ 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 â the use of their language would preserve their prejudices and debasement, and their language was not sufficient to express the ideas of civilized life.Â
Even Governor of South Australia George Grey, who was relatively pro-Aboriginal, appeared to partially share this opinion and remarked in his journal that âthe ruder languages disappear successively, and the tongue of England alone is heard aroundâ (Grey 1841: 200-201). What was seen as a âcivilizingâ 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 â including Revival Linguistics and Revivalomics â 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).
The English term âparts of speechâ is actually a mistranslation of long standing of the Latin partÄs oratiĆnis, itself a translation of the Greek merÄ logou, in which the term oratiĆ / logos takes not its common meaning of âspeechâ but rather the technical sense of âsentenceâ (Halliday 1977/2003: 98). So the notion of âparts of speechâ, which may seem to suggest that these âpartsâ are natural classes somehow inherent to the language, should in fact be read âparts of the sentenceâ, in other words, constructs of language analysis. This confusion seems fitting as an epigraph to tracing the process of âtranslingual practiceâ (Liu 1995) whereby this category came to be introduced from the Graeco-Roman tradition of linguistic scholarship to its Sinitic counterpart by a multilingual Chinese scholar just over a century ago. This notion allows us to understand the complexity of an achievement which cannot be reduced to âexplaining change in terms of either foreign impact or indigenous evolutionâ (Liu 1995: xix, emphasis added), but rather allows us to recognise the scholar, deeply versed in both Chinese and European scholarly traditions, strategically deploying concepts from both traditions in the service of his scholarly and political project.
Alan Reed Libert University of Newcastle, New South Wales
Mainstream theoretical linguists have generally ignored artificial languages, apparently considering them unworthy of attention. This is true not only of “fictional languages” such as Klingon, but also of “serious” languages such as Esperanto. Much of the linguistic work which has been done on artificial languages has been carried out by Esperantists and is not concerned with structural aspects of these languages (see e.g. Schubert, ed. 1989). Serious languages have usually been designed to facilitate international communication and so are generally intended to be optimally designed for easy learning and use. Chomskyan linguists assume that there is a human language faculty, which sets limits on a possible human language. If this is the case, one might think that there would be limits even on languages which have been consciously created — unless one were trying to be perverse, which one presumably would not do in creating a language for international communication — or at least there would be limits on a usable artificial language.
The strangest, and perhaps the most interesting, artificial languages are the a priori languages, that is, those (supposedly) designed from scratch without reference to existing languages. These will seem exotic for various reasons, one being the total unfamiliarity of most of the vocabulary to speakers of any natural language. This is in contrast to another main type of artificial languages, a posteriori languages, which are based on one or more natural languages. Still other languages are called mixed languages, as they contain substantial material of both the a priori and a posteriori types (this way of classifying artificial languages has long been used, e.g. by Couturat and Leau 1903). Esperanto, the best known and most successful artificial language, is of the a posteriori type, and much of Esperanto will be familiar to someone who knows several major European languages (for a recent grammar of Esperanto in English, see Gledhill 2000). VolapĂŒk, a mixed language, was the most successful artificial language before Esperanto (see e.g. Post 1890 for more information on it).
By looking at artificial languages, in particular at the a priori ones, we may be able to explore the limits of language universals: perhaps universals will constrain even language creation. In fact, there may not be any truly a priori artificial languages, since we cannot create — or at least cannot fluently use — a language which lacks properties that natural languages must have.
6-9 January 2027 San Francisco (United States) NAAHoLS 2027
28-29 January 2027 Paris (France) SHESL Conference 2027
History of terminology â Diachronic terminology
The emergence of a terminological conscienceness
