Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17597536.2019.1603063
Norma Romanelli
ABSTRACT This paper offers some thoughts on Vincenzo Peretti’s Italian Grammar (1795). We shall see how Peretti promotes the legitimacy of his work on the basis of an explicit ‘horizon de retrospection‘ made up of the most representative authors of the tradition, notably Benedetto Buommattei, author of Della Lingua toscana (1643). Peretti’s respect for the auctoritates is accompanied by a commentary on the inadequacy of the competition (Veneroni’s Maître Italien). Our aim is to identify both the language model as presented in the Italian Grammar and its relationship with its reference model, and we will also account for the treatment of two categories that Buommattei had elevated to the rank of ‘parts of speech‘: ’segnacaso’ and ’ripieno’. Finally, we will conclude with an analysis of the pedagogical methods proposed by Peretti.
{"title":"An Italian Grammarian between Paris and London: tradition, competition and methods of pedagogic transmission in the works of Vincenzo Peretti (1795–1803)","authors":"Norma Romanelli","doi":"10.1080/17597536.2019.1603063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17597536.2019.1603063","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper offers some thoughts on Vincenzo Peretti’s Italian Grammar (1795). We shall see how Peretti promotes the legitimacy of his work on the basis of an explicit ‘horizon de retrospection‘ made up of the most representative authors of the tradition, notably Benedetto Buommattei, author of Della Lingua toscana (1643). Peretti’s respect for the auctoritates is accompanied by a commentary on the inadequacy of the competition (Veneroni’s Maître Italien). Our aim is to identify both the language model as presented in the Italian Grammar and its relationship with its reference model, and we will also account for the treatment of two categories that Buommattei had elevated to the rank of ‘parts of speech‘: ’segnacaso’ and ’ripieno’. Finally, we will conclude with an analysis of the pedagogical methods proposed by Peretti.","PeriodicalId":41504,"journal":{"name":"Language & History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17597536.2019.1603063","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49454696","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17597536.2019.1603013
I. Vinogradov
ABSTRACT This article presents an overview of linguistic efforts aimed at a description of the Poqomchi’ language (Mayan family, Guatemala). This language remains one of the least documented languages in the Mayan family despite the almost 500-year history of description, which was initiated by Spanish missionaries in the second half of the 16th century. The next attempt at description was associated with European travellers and ethnographers in the second half of the 19th century, followed by the efforts of American and European missionaries in the 20th century. Finally, native Guatemalan linguists who trained under the American descriptive tradition continue to work on Poqomchi’ at present. This paper seeks to describe the variety of approaches and to analyse the possible causes of imperfections in the descriptions. Abbreviations 3: third person; dat: dative; def: definite article; nmlz: nominalization; sg: singular.
{"title":"The history of the Poqomchi’ language description","authors":"I. Vinogradov","doi":"10.1080/17597536.2019.1603013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17597536.2019.1603013","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article presents an overview of linguistic efforts aimed at a description of the Poqomchi’ language (Mayan family, Guatemala). This language remains one of the least documented languages in the Mayan family despite the almost 500-year history of description, which was initiated by Spanish missionaries in the second half of the 16th century. The next attempt at description was associated with European travellers and ethnographers in the second half of the 19th century, followed by the efforts of American and European missionaries in the 20th century. Finally, native Guatemalan linguists who trained under the American descriptive tradition continue to work on Poqomchi’ at present. This paper seeks to describe the variety of approaches and to analyse the possible causes of imperfections in the descriptions. Abbreviations 3: third person; dat: dative; def: definite article; nmlz: nominalization; sg: singular.","PeriodicalId":41504,"journal":{"name":"Language & History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17597536.2019.1603013","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47311905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-09-02DOI: 10.1080/17597536.2019.1576445
Andrew Ji Ma
ABSTRACT This paper aims to examine how the Tudor ‘linguist’ John Hart (c. 1501–1574) attempted to persuade his readers to accept and support his proposals for orthographic reform. The study is mainly based on the seven pieces of paratext attached to his three linguistic treatises. I argue that a God-king-commonwealth rhetorical model is discernible from Hart’s persuasive writings. On this ground, I argue that the religio-political profits of spelling standardisation were discussed by Hart in relation to the pushing-through of religious reform, the amplification of monarchical power, and the construction of national commonwealth.
{"title":"The religio-political ‘commodities’ of orthographic reform in Tudor England: John Hart and the God-king-commonwealth rhetorical model","authors":"Andrew Ji Ma","doi":"10.1080/17597536.2019.1576445","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17597536.2019.1576445","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper aims to examine how the Tudor ‘linguist’ John Hart (c. 1501–1574) attempted to persuade his readers to accept and support his proposals for orthographic reform. The study is mainly based on the seven pieces of paratext attached to his three linguistic treatises. I argue that a God-king-commonwealth rhetorical model is discernible from Hart’s persuasive writings. On this ground, I argue that the religio-political profits of spelling standardisation were discussed by Hart in relation to the pushing-through of religious reform, the amplification of monarchical power, and the construction of national commonwealth.","PeriodicalId":41504,"journal":{"name":"Language & History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17597536.2019.1576445","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48975873","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-09-02DOI: 10.1080/17597536.2018.1522857
D. Moore
ABSTRACT Knowledge of a researcher’s orthographic conventions is necessary for interpreting pronunciation from early sources on Australian Aboriginal languages. Early researchers of Australian languages were more likely to represent sounds consistently if they used a uniform orthography, allowing the problems of English spelling to be avoided. Uniform orthographies began with a concern for the accurate transliteration of literary languages in the late eighteenth century and were further developed for the description of previously unwritten languages in the nineteenth century. This paper traces the development of the uniform orthographies and their pioneering role in linguistic description in Central Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
{"title":"Uniform orthographies and phonetics in Central Australia 1890–1910","authors":"D. Moore","doi":"10.1080/17597536.2018.1522857","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17597536.2018.1522857","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Knowledge of a researcher’s orthographic conventions is necessary for interpreting pronunciation from early sources on Australian Aboriginal languages. Early researchers of Australian languages were more likely to represent sounds consistently if they used a uniform orthography, allowing the problems of English spelling to be avoided. Uniform orthographies began with a concern for the accurate transliteration of literary languages in the late eighteenth century and were further developed for the description of previously unwritten languages in the nineteenth century. This paper traces the development of the uniform orthographies and their pioneering role in linguistic description in Central Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.","PeriodicalId":41504,"journal":{"name":"Language & History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17597536.2018.1522857","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47502980","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17597536.2018.1443749
D. Cram, C. Neis
There are few aspects of Western civilisation in which writing does not play a central role – from literature to law, from advertising to political control, from twitter messages to the intricacies of information technology. Its pervasiveness is seen to be the more profound if writing is considered globally, and taken to include literacy, numeracy and graphic symbolisation more generally, as in treatments such as Christin (2002) and in any number the lavishly illustrated coffee-table books aimed at a wide readership. The topic of writing systems is thus a huge area of academic study, since it necessarily involves so many different disciplines, each with its own specific applications and concerns. This themed issue on the historiography of writing systems reflects, we hope, a small measure of the richness and variety of the topic as a whole. But what unifies the papers as a collection, and we hope gives them a common focus, is that they all, in one way or another, relate to a substantial branch of the language sciences rather than being anchored in one of the other adjacent disciplines in the humanities. A political theorist might study political language as a way of investigating how politics works; but someone who studies political language as a way of finding out how language works belong to the language sciences. We use the term ‘language sciences’ here advisedly. Peter Daniels, co-author of a linguistically-oriented collection of articles on the world’s writing systems (Daniels and Bright 1996), has also produced a useful historical survey entitled The history of writing as a history of linguistics (2013). Daniels’ title is a thought-provoking one, whichever way the two component elements are put, since the study of language Western European tradition has been based on an almost paradoxical conception of the relation between speech and writing. It is a truism that speech is logically prior to writing, based on simple empirical observation. All known human societies have language of a spoken or signed variety, but there are fully functional speech communities in the world today that do not have writing; furthermore, every human being, barring medically exceptional circumstances, acquires fluency in speech before acquiring the ability to write. In both cases, speech comes first. But in the Western tradition the truism of the logical priority of speech over writing is often asserted as an ontological doctrine, that speech is what language necessarily consists in, and that writing is a secondary epiphenomenon. This is problematic as a starting point, since it conflicts with an equally important truism based on self-evident empirical evidence: in human societies which do have a writing system of some sort, writing seems inevitably to have been associated with political, legal and religious control. The relation between speech and writing is thus not a simplex but
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Pub Date : 2018-04-25DOI: 10.1080/17597536.2018.1441949
E. Poppe
Abstract Ogam is a writing system invented for the Irish language and originally used as a monument script in inscriptions on stone in Ireland and western Britain between the fifth (or late fourth) and the seventh centuries. Even though it was no longer used as a means of communication after the eighth century, it became an emblem of linguistic and cultural identity for medieval and early modern Irish scholars and poets because of its distinctive form, structure and letter names. The paper describes the characteristics of ogam as a script system and traces its place in medieval learned traditions about the origin and status of the Irish language and its alphabet, its use as a terminological tool for descriptions of Irish grammar and phonology, and its contribution to the construction of cultural memory and identity.
{"title":"Writing systems and cultural identity: ogam in medieval and early modern Ireland","authors":"E. Poppe","doi":"10.1080/17597536.2018.1441949","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17597536.2018.1441949","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Ogam is a writing system invented for the Irish language and originally used as a monument script in inscriptions on stone in Ireland and western Britain between the fifth (or late fourth) and the seventh centuries. Even though it was no longer used as a means of communication after the eighth century, it became an emblem of linguistic and cultural identity for medieval and early modern Irish scholars and poets because of its distinctive form, structure and letter names. The paper describes the characteristics of ogam as a script system and traces its place in medieval learned traditions about the origin and status of the Irish language and its alphabet, its use as a terminological tool for descriptions of Irish grammar and phonology, and its contribution to the construction of cultural memory and identity.","PeriodicalId":41504,"journal":{"name":"Language & History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17597536.2018.1441949","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49071530","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-04-24DOI: 10.1080/17597536.2018.1441951
John E Vice
Abstract This article will focus on the experience of one practitioner of one particular system of shorthand: the use by Charles Dickens of Thomas Gurney’s shorthand system, first when he worked at Doctors’ Commons (probably 1828–1831) and then as a parliamentary reporter in Westminster (roughly 1831–1834). My focus of interest is not so much the linguistic details of Gurney’s shorthand, which has been studied elsewhere, but the context in which this system was used by Dickens in his work as a reporter. I will explain how Dickens learnt the Gurney’s system and used it professionally, how his experience is given literary form in the character of David Copperfield, what it was like to report in Parliament in the 1830s and how Dickens’ experience as a shorthand writer influenced his writing and his political outlook.
{"title":"Charles Dickens and Gurney’s shorthand: ‘that savage stenographic mystery’","authors":"John E Vice","doi":"10.1080/17597536.2018.1441951","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17597536.2018.1441951","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article will focus on the experience of one practitioner of one particular system of shorthand: the use by Charles Dickens of Thomas Gurney’s shorthand system, first when he worked at Doctors’ Commons (probably 1828–1831) and then as a parliamentary reporter in Westminster (roughly 1831–1834). My focus of interest is not so much the linguistic details of Gurney’s shorthand, which has been studied elsewhere, but the context in which this system was used by Dickens in his work as a reporter. I will explain how Dickens learnt the Gurney’s system and used it professionally, how his experience is given literary form in the character of David Copperfield, what it was like to report in Parliament in the 1830s and how Dickens’ experience as a shorthand writer influenced his writing and his political outlook.","PeriodicalId":41504,"journal":{"name":"Language & History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17597536.2018.1441951","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47808522","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-04-16DOI: 10.1080/17597536.2018.1441955
C. Neis
Abstract In this paper, I present a brief overview of conceptions of ‘exotic’ writing systems in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with particular emphasis on ‘exotic’ forerunners of writing (such as the Peruvian quipus or the wampum belts of the Iroquois) and Egyptian hieroglyphs. The history of writing was often conceived of as a gradual development with a growing degree of complexity by authors like Antoine-Yves Goguet, Jean-Jacques Rousseau or William Warburton. Their description of ‘exotic’ writing systems generally reveals a euro-centric perspective as well as a sometimes inadequate knowledge of the true nature of different writing systems. After a description of several ‘exotic’ forerunners of writing, conceptions of Egyptian hieroglyphs are subjected to a more detailed examination. Given their enigmatic character, hieroglyphs seemed particularly well adapted for use in universal language schemes. In the last part of the paper, I will establish a link between non-alphabetical writing systems and ‘real characters’ to show how much the latter are indebted to the model of non-European scripts.
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Pub Date : 2018-04-16DOI: 10.1080/17597536.2018.1441950
Gordon Whittaker
Abstract The system of writing employed by the Aztec Empire and its immediate neighbours in early 16th-century Mesoamerica has a number of characteristics that make it highly unusual in comparative perspective. Among them is the fact that it was almost entirely restricted to the recording of names or, more precisely, of personal and place names, titles and professions. All other areas of information were recorded by means of iconography and a numeral-based notation system. This article will discuss the nature of Aztec names and the manner in which they are recorded in Aztec writing.
{"title":"Aztec hieroglyphics: a name-based writing system","authors":"Gordon Whittaker","doi":"10.1080/17597536.2018.1441950","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17597536.2018.1441950","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The system of writing employed by the Aztec Empire and its immediate neighbours in early 16th-century Mesoamerica has a number of characteristics that make it highly unusual in comparative perspective. Among them is the fact that it was almost entirely restricted to the recording of names or, more precisely, of personal and place names, titles and professions. All other areas of information were recorded by means of iconography and a numeral-based notation system. This article will discuss the nature of Aztec names and the manner in which they are recorded in Aztec writing.","PeriodicalId":41504,"journal":{"name":"Language & History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17597536.2018.1441950","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48573633","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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