Modern European Languages Research Articles

Tribute to David Cook

David John Cook, Professor of English and Head of the Department of Modern European Languages, University of Ilorin, Nigeria, between 1977 and 1989, passed on, on Sunday, 30 March 2003. He was seventy-four years old. David Cook had been down for quite a while. He actually spent the last eighteen months of his life in Kingsland House, Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, United Kingdom.

Turn to the history of linguistics

SummaryIn the 1940s and 1950s, the leading proponents of American synchronic linguistics showed little interest in the history of linguistics. Some attention to historiography occurred in subfields of linguistics closest to the humanities – linguistic anthropology, historical linguistics, modern European languages – but the ‘science of language’ developed by Leonard Bloomfield and his descriptivist followers demanded autonomy from other disciplines and from the past. Increasing American contact with European linguistics during the 1950s culminated in the 1962 Ninth International Congress of Linguists in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here Noam Chomsky presented a plenary session paper that appeared in print in four versions between 1962 and 1964, each version incorporating an increasing amount of discussion of the early 20th-century precursors to the descriptivists and a number of 17th- and 19th-century studies of language and mind. Charles Hockett responded by organizing his 1964 presidential address to the Linguistic Society of America as a history of linguistics, emphasizing periods, figures, and ideas not included in Chomsky’s work. Historiographers of the time recognized a surge of American interest in the history of linguistics beginning in the early 1960s and most attributed it largely to Chomsky’s work. Historiographic publication increased significantly among the descriptivists; at the same time it emerged among the generativists, most of whom followed Chomsky in exploring pre-20th-century philosophical ideas or reconsidering concepts and practices of the descriptivists’ forerunners. The resulting visibility and impetus to the history of linguistics contributed to the foundation upon which linguistic historiography matured in North America in the later decades of the 20th century.

Anecdote And History

AbstractAlthough the term “anecdote” entered the modern European languages fairly recently and remains to this day ill‐defined, the short, freestanding accounts of particular events, true or invented, that are usually referred to as anecdotes have been around from time immemorial. They have also always stood in a close relation to the longer, more elaborate narratives of history, sometimes in a supportive role, as examples and illustrations, sometimes in a challenging role, as the repressed of history —“la petite histoire.” Historians' relation to them, in turn, varied from appreciative to dismissive in accordance with their own objectives in writing history. It appears that highly structured anecdotes of the kind that are remembered and find their way into anecdote collections depend on and tend to confirm established views of history, the world, and human nature. In contrast, loosely structured anecdotes akin to the modern fait divers have usually worked to undermine established views and stimulate new ones, either by presenting material known to few and excluded from officially authorized histories, or by reporting “odd” occurrences for which the established views of history, the world, and human nature do not easily account.

What Good Is a Rebellious Teenager? Classics and Linguistics in the Twentieth Century

What Good Is a Rebellious Teenager?Classics and Linguistics in the Twentieth Century Eleanor Dickey In looking at traditional specialties within the APA, one cannot get any more traditional than linguistics.1 This is because, in the beginning, the American Philological Association was not an organization of classicists at all; it was an organization of scholars interested in language, any language. The justification for the founding of the association, as printed in the first issue of TAPA, was to provide a society for "the professors, friends, and patrons of linguistic science in America." The contents of the first volume of TAPA show what this meant: there were papers entitled "On the nature and theory of the Greek accent," "On the nature and designation of the accent in Sanskrit," "On the aorist subjunctive and future indicative with and ," "On the best method of studying the North American languages," "On the German vernacular of Pennsylvania," "On the present condition of the question as to the origin of language," "On certain forms of the English verb which were used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," "On some mistaken notions of Algonkin grammar, and on mistranslations of words from Eliot's Bible," and "Contributions to Creole Grammar." In other words, out of nine papers, two were on Greek, one was on Sanskrit, one was on the origin of language, and the remaining five were on various modern languages. None was on history, literature, or any other non-linguistic topic. The fact that the American Philological Association was not originally an organization of classicists at all sheds some light on its name. If you look up the word "philology" in most American dictionaries, you will find a variety of different meanings, but none of them is "classics." Philology can mean linguistics, or it can mean the study of languages, literatures, and cultures in a general sense, [End Page 288] and it can often mean other things as well, but it normally does not mean "classics." People who know this sometimes wonder why the main American classics organization is called the American Philological Association, when in England, for example, the main organization of classicists is called the Classical Association, and the Philological Society, which also exists, is an organization of linguists, most of whom work on modern languages. But in order to solve that problem properly, you have to turn the question around and ask not why the main American classics organization is called the American Philological Association, but why the American Philological Association is an organization of classicists. Back in 1869, when the APA was founded, American higher education was only beginning the process of professionalization that would eventually lead to the university system we know today. The humanities had not yet been broken down into subjects and departments, and "philology" in the broad sense of languages, literatures, and cultures was used in situations not radically different from those where we might now use "humanities." So the founders of the APA were establishing a professional organization for philology in the broad sense, that is for scholars interested in languages, literatures, and cultures, and it was simply understood that naturally language was the most prominent of these angles and culture the least prominent. But the founders were well aware that the new society covered a huge area, and so at the first meeting they drew up a list of seven subfields into which papers could be divided for separate sessions once the organization got big enough to hold more than one session at annual meetings.1 These seven subfields were: 1. The science of language, and history of philology 2. Oriental languages and literatures 3. Classical (Latin and Greek) languages and literatures 4. Modern European languages and literatures 5. English language and literature 6. American aboriginal languages 7. Linguistic pedagogy Now these seven subfields did not all have equal status. The third, Latin and Greek languages and literatures, was acknowledged to be the largest and most important. It was also the oldest, since the systematic study of other languages and literatures, and the discipline of linguistics itself, had grown out of the study of Latin and Greek in the preceding century. Nevertheless all seven fields, and...

The Will in Seneca the Younger

T HERE ARE FEW WORDS IN the philosophical lexicon so slippery as 'will'. In an attempt to track history of the idea of will, the most we have going for us is widely agreed-upon lexical correspondence. In modern European languages, so far as I know, we can at least pick out counterparts: will, volonte, volont'a, Wille. Push it back bit further and you arguably add the Latin voluntas. But as almost everyone agrees, you cannot push this lexical correspondence back to ancient Greek, where neither Poikqmq nor npouipEmiq, neither 6t6vota nor any other term quite does the job.' What lies behind these lexical correspondences, though, is considerably less clear. Just what is meant by 'will' and whether it exists-or can helpfully be talked about, if one's sympathies run towards instrumentalism in such matters-are all controversial questions. What A. Kenny rightly calls a view familiar in modern philosophical tradition holds that

Power, authority and legitimacy

Management, human resources, organization, control, leadership, etc., all seem to be just so many euphemisms for power, and this suggests a discourse of management and organization that calls things by their proper name. This paper on the contrary stresses the need to resolve the concept of ‘power’ itself into more differentiated notions, and proposes that clarification may be derived from distinctions once explicit in the vocabulary of Classical antiquity, but lost in modern European languages. It argues that nothing but confusion in thinking about organizations, management and legitimation can result from the failure to recognize that the phenomena this vocabulary identifies and distinguishes are irreducibly different.

La metáfrasis de la <i>Ilíada</i> al griego vulgar. A propósito de la <i>Ilíada</i> de Nicolás Lucanis

The illustrated Iliad printed in Venice in 1526 is a rare book which is interesting in several ways: a) It is the first Iliad in a modern European language, it is not a translation of the Homeric text but an adaptation or, much better, a «metaphrasis» in trochaicus octosyllabic verses from a byzantine version. b) Until the Apocopos by Bergadis in Cretan dialect appeared (Venice 1509), this Iliad was the first book printed in modern Greek. c) The metaphrasis by Lukanis shows an important publishing activity dedicated to the emigrant Greek people, to the readers of the Greek lands depending on Venice yet, as well as to the Greek speakers of the Ottoman Empire. d) Culturally speaking. Lukanis’ Iliad demonstrates that in the 16th century a byzantine pattern of rhetorical vulgarization of the classical works was valid, that was the Hermoniakos’ Iliad .

Some specific features in the development of the dual in Slovene as compared to other Slavic languages

Tesnierè's work "Les formes du duel en Slovène" and his "Atlas linguistique pour servir à l'étude du duel en slovène" has remained the basic work to consult in dealing with the category of the dual in Slovene and has been used as well by linguists researching this category in other Slavic languages. Tesnieère himself explained the reason for doing his research: the dual greatly interested his teacher A. Meillet and Tesniere wanted to study this category and the way it was disappearing in a modern European language, the choice being very limited (he mentioned certain speakers of Lithuanian, and three Slavic languages: Slovene, Slovincian 1 and Lower Sorbian; Tesnière 1925a: VIII; all references in this paper are to Tesnière 1925a).

How ‘concrete’` is West Greenlandic?

Abstract Anyone familiar with West Greenlandic - or any other Eskimo language - is unlikely to disagree with the suggestion that this language is in some sense more ‘concrete’` than that of modern European languages. Statements to this effect can be - and have been - made for various languages spoken by hunter-gatherers, particularly within the anthropological linguistic tradition of North America. However, convincing evidence for claims that a given language is lacking in abstract expressions is hard to come by. In fact, counter-evidence is readily to be found in the case of West Greenlandic: one need only think of such derivational suffixes for forming abstract nouns as -ssuseq (‘quality of), to be discussed in section 2 below.

Modern European languages and universality

The prospect of further political integration of Europe has raised the question of a common European language. The economic arguments for encouraging such a ‘universal’ language are readily apparent. The EEC currently spends vast amounts on translation into only a few of the several languages used by the Community’s members. But beyond the looming cloud of financial urgency there is the instinctive if apprehensive reflex on the part of Europeans that any definable polity (as the Community promises or threatens to become) requires its own distinctive language. The apprehension arises from a generally shared experience that a distinctive language encompasses every aspect of an individual’s destiny, and decisively so in the vital spheres of culture and personal relationships. The prospect of one’s primary distinctive language being eclipsed by the emergence of another (and for the majority of Europeans it would indeed be another) distinctive idiom may be intellectually entertained but affectively rejected. Yet this experience of distinctive language as an all-encompassing existential reality, and a must for the viability of a definable polity, stems in no small measure from the historical fact that modern European languages are themselves triumphs of relative universality. Within their sharply defined political boundaries these languages generally reign supreme. As a sop to democratic pluralism, other languages within the same borders are tolerated or granted a privileged minority status. The present paper looks at how the ideological groundwork for the relative universality of modern European languages was laid in Renaissance Italy. Specifically, we shall be looking at the Preface to the first book of Lorenzo VaIla’s Elegances of the Latin Language, and deduce from it (a) his view that a quality language is the condition for the cultural superiority which both expresses and reinforces political dominion, and (b) his view of what constitutes a ‘quality’ language. We shall also briefly discuss how the old wine of linguistic rectitude when poured into the new bottles of national polities and fortified by print and audiovisual technologies, ferments into the heady brew of ‘distinctive’ language. One of the most influential books to come out of the Italian Renaissance, Six Books of the Elegances of theLatin Language,’ by Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) was also one of the first to receive the honours of publication by means of the new technology of printing. Its celebrity was equalled perhaps only by its usefulness both for students of classical Latin and the Latin of Roman civil law. Less commented on is the paean to the Latin language in the Preface to the first book,

Arabic Mechanical Engineering: Survey of the Historical sources

The first and more important section of this article lists all the known treatises in Arabic on Fine Technology – water-clocks, automata, pumps, trick vessels, fountains, etc. The ideas, techniques and components in these treatises are of great importance in the history of machine technology. For each treatise information is given on the provenance of MSS, editions in Arabic and translations, paraphrases or commentaries in modern European languages. In addition to treatises by Arabic writers, similar information is also given on Greek mechanical treatises if these have survived only in Arabic versions.The second section deals with utilitarian machines such as mills and water-raising machines. The various sources of information about these machines is discussed, including Arabic works on geography and travel, iconography and archaeology.

The place of broadcasting translation in a multilingual Nigeria

Department of Modern European Languages, Faculty of Arts, University of Lagos, Yaba, Lagos, Nigeria.

Reflections on (New) Philology

As the following remarks are to reflect my own scholarly commitment and experience, I should begin by saying that they come from a medievalist who in his work is always conscious of dealing with the works of a past state of civilization. They also come from a historian of literature, who in contrast to political or economic historians makes written documents the subject of his study, and who in contrast to linguists looks at them as works of verbal art. And finally, they come from a professor of English literature who works closely with colleagues whose ultimate aim is the aesthetic analysis and appraisal of verbal objects, and of whom many today feel driven to ask deeper theoretical questions about, not only the nature of aesthetic values, but the nature of language itself and its function to communicate about the relation between object and perceiver, about the psychological or political function of literature and of language, and so on. Working in such an environment naturally brings with it a certain amount of confrontation, which in turn has its occasional political side in discussions about such practical matters as departmental curricula and new appointments. Though I would not rank myself among philologists who have little use for literary criticism and theory, I can of course not help being conscious of pressures and of attitudes on the other side however unvoiced they may remain that would reject philology. Hence, my remarks will reflect a practitioner's concern with what is and with what continuing value for the study of medieval literature it has. They will describe a position and are in no way intended as a Forschungsbericht; the few illustrations cited are no more than examples that have crossed my attention in recent months. By tradition, philology can be taken in either a narrow or a broad sense. In the former it designates the academic discipline of studying or scientifically elucidating the basic, literal meaning of verbal documents. Originally, and primarily, this meant the study of older stages of particular languages, whose records, in contrast to contemporary utterances, required careful investigation and the application of a wide-ranging knowledge in order to make sense. Thus, dealt first with the classical languages, Greek and Latin, and with surviving documents of other dead languages, such as ancient Hebrew and other Near Eastern languages, and eventually the various branches of the Indo-European family. In a short time, philologists extended their studies to the older stages of modern European languages, of their national tongues, as well. To uncover their meaning, it was necessary to understand a variety of ancient writing systems and the phonetic value of individual symbols, whether these have continued in use or not. Once the hypothetical sounds hidden behind written signs had been identified, one could set out to deal with words and sentences and their meanings and

Teaching and research in electromagnetics at the University of Pretoria

The city of Pretoria is the executive capital of the Republic of South Africa, and lies in the Transvaal province, on the high inland plateau. It is approximately 1500 km from Cape Town in the South, and 600 km from Durban on the East coast. The altitude of 1400m (4500 ft) ensures a moderate climate. The University of Pretoria was founded in 1908 as a section of the Transvaal University College, and formally became the University of Pretoria (UP) in 1930, with Afrikaans as the medium of teaching. (Afrikaans developed from 17th century Dutch because of geographical isolation, and is today a separate, modern European language with its own grammar and literature. It is spoken as a first language by about 3.5 million South Africans). The student body at UP currently numbers about 22 000.

The Old Man of the Mountain in Medieval Folklore

THE character of the Old Man of the Mountain is no doubt known to many modern readers through Fitzgerald's brilliant and freely translated account of his supposed friendship with the poet of the Rubaiyat. However, this enigmatic and sinister figure had already made his presence felt in European history and tradition during and after the period of the Crusades as the leader of a dreaded sect known as the Assassins. In modern European languages the word has come to mean a paid or fanatical killer whose victims are usually public figures, but it was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that the philologist Silvester de Sacy demonstrated that the word 'assassin' was derived from the Arabic Hashishin, 'those who use hashish.' The fact that the name of this mystical Islamic group has become synonomous with 'murderer' indicates something of Europe's perception of the sect of Shiite Muslims who enjoyed a spectacular but relatively brief period of dominance in the Muslim world. Historically, the sect arose as the result of a schism in the Arabic world over the rightful successor to Mohammed. One of the stronger rebel leaders known as Hassan Sabbah founded a sect known variously as the Ismealites, Batinites, Assassins or Hashisin. In 1090, he captured the fortress of Alamut in Persia which became the centre of the sect until it fell to the Moguls in 1256. A second branch of the Assassins existed in Syria as early as 1100. This group is especially important because of its contact with the Crusaders. The Shiite sect was influenced by Neo-Platonism and its structure was built on a system of degrees of initiation.2 One of the lower orders, the Fida'is or 'selfsacrificing ones,' were the historical source for the numerous references to the assassins and their amazing obedience to their leader. Of the other grades, except for the leader himself, little notice appears in any written or oral European record. The influence of the sect was felt in three major culture areas of the medieval world, Moslem, Jewish and Christian. Analysis of references to the Assassins in literature, chronicles and travelogues of all three groups reveals something of the process by which cultural contact is transformed into tradition. The lore associated with the Assassins developed in response to the kind of influence exerted by the sect on different culture groups. As a result, the legends which evolved from topical, historical facts about a radical religious sect reflect both the nature and intensity of contact and the varying attitudes to the Assassins. The terrorist activities of the Assassins are frequently cited in Arabic chronicles. References to Hassan, the first leader, as 'able, courageous and learned in mathematics, arithmetic, astronomy and magic' date from the last quarter of the eleventh century after he had conquered Alamut and his political power was at its height.3 There are many references to the Syrian Assassins as well. In 1102, a Moslem leader was killed

Literary Whiteness and the Afro-Hispanic Difference

OURTEEN HUNDRED NINETY-TWO should remind Hispanics of the publication of the first grammar of a modern European language, a fact overshadowed in historical records by the unification of the Spanish nation, the purification of infidels, and the launching of the New World adventure. Antonio de Nebrija's work billed the Castilian dialect as the companion of the Empire, an appropriate grammatical endorsement of Spain's ethnic assertion, religious and racial bigotry, as well as the ultimate civilized weapon for political expansionism among the illiterate.4 Spanish grammar became the colonial pretext for the assimilation of otherness and others. Imperial grammarians established a test of literacy for Hispanic citizenship, which, if successfully passed, allegedly provided of-

Form in "Novas Cartas Portuguesas"

Few works in the history of Portuguese letters have captured the widespread attention and critical acclaim generated by the 1972 publication of Novas Cartas Portuguesas by Maria Teresa Horta, Maria Isabel Barreno, and Maria Velho da Costa. Banned by the Portuguese right-wing government shortly after publication, it was finally released in 1974, and within a year was translated into nearly every modern European language. In January 1975, upon publication of Helen R. Lane's English version, the book received notices in major literary reviews throughout the United States. And yet, even though more than a decade has passed since then, the significance of Novas Cartas Portuguesas as a pioneer work by three women writers on women remains largely unexplored. The purpose of the present study is to begin this process of exploration-discussing the international best-seller within a broader context of Portuguese reality, and examining its importance as a socio-political document. But I shall also address a more theoretical issue related to the form of the

Historical Knowing (review)

252 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY only her value-judgment reading of some of the examples (pp. 84, 85, 94, 466-467) may resist the mark-property analysis. In making 'the M' a name of the property M we are actually doing justice to the source from which Barth developed her notion of logophoric--von Freytag's "concrete universal." Modern logicians trained in the Fregean tradition should not regard people like von Freytag, Pf~nder, or Maritain as doing anything wildly unusual when they predicate 'P' of M--with P being a mark of M. This had been the routine sytle of predication until Frege. The abnormal articles used by those authors are but a belated linguistic fallout of the old Latin predication usages in modern European languages. Barth herself encourages us to take this view of reducing the problem of the articles to the issue of the discrepancies between old and new predication theory when she states that the actual presence of the articles prefixed to M is not essential for her purposes (p. 40). Without articles, the general form of the sentences we worry about is no longer 'the M is P' but 'M is P' (or rather, 'M est P', in Latin), and the puzzles, if any, cannot arise from the absent ("zero") articles. IGNACIOANGELELL1 University of Texas at Austin Historical Knowing. By Leon J. Goldstein. (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1975. Pp. 216. $10.00) Recent Anglo-American philosophy of history is primarily concerned with the problems of historical knowing. Goldstein examies some of those trends in this tradition that proclaim that philosophically justified criteria of reference, truth, and objectivity are fundamental to historical knowing. But it is also argued here that actual historical practice often fails to satisfy these philosophically imposed criteria. Indeed, he claims, many of the criteria from which these requirements emerge are philosophically inadequate or misdirected. Further, the realistic, positivistic, and linguistic strictures to which historical knowing must conform are rooted in theories of perception, causation, and objectivity inappropriate for the philosophy of historical knowing. But the real question of the philosophy of history, claims the author, is not whether history satisfies these externally imposed criteria of cognitive status, but "What is factuality or empirical reference in a discipline practiced the way this one is?" (p. xv). A large part of this work, and l believe the best part, is devoted to a critique of historical realism. The examination of this school is meant to illustrate one of the inadequate aspects of the above mentioned philosophic criteria of historical knowing, the realist criterion. The realist school maintains or supposes the thesis that a real past, as it was when it was being lived, is the touchstone against which we must test the truth or falsity of the products of our historical constructions. In opposition to this thesis, Goldstein maintains that any philosophy of historical knowing should be mainly concerned with what the phenomenologists call the "constitution" of past human events, that is, a description of our access to the historical past by noting how it is constructed in the actual process of historical research (p. xxi). The realist's concern about whether there are objects independent of our consciousness to which our conceptions of things must conform is not properly a historical concern, for no historical past exists in that sense. Abstract considerations about the reality of the past, then, do not fall within the purview of critical philosophy of history, for "history is not interested in the past as such but in the constitution of past human events" (p. xx). Goldstein further argues that philosophy of history as it is practiced in the English-language community does not concern itself with the actual procedures historians utilize in their constitution of the past. Rather, it takes its departure from the finished literary text of the historian, and a faulty common sense, ordinary language view of the historical world. Given this faulty orientation and their failure to attend to the experiences of historical constitution, BOOK REVIEWS 253 contemporary philosophers tend to impose upon philosophy of history conceptions of reference , truth, or factuality that simply do not fit. Goldstein, then, departs importantly from recent approaches...

The Doctor of Arts in Modern European Languages at Claremont Graduate School

The Doctor of Arts in Modern European Languages at Claremont Graduate School

G. B. Gelli and the Rebellion Against Latin

Modern European languages reached full development in their spoken and written forms during the middle ages, but it took centuries before the languages of the people became the languages of ‘the books'— those books which are indispensable to serious learning and intellectual progress. Today an intelligent person who can read and write can get a liberal education either in schools or on his own. Yet during the late Renaissance, in Italy and elsewhere, a thorough knowledge of one's mother tongue was hardly enough for one to become literate. There were love lyrics, epic poems, legends, fables, but aside from some legal documents and a few compilations, very little recorded knowledge was available in the vernacular.