ENGLISH ABSTRACT Due to their special properties, relational adjectives (in particular when serving as classifying modifiers) have been the subject of detailed investigations in many languages, including Russian, French, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch and German, but they are not mentioned in Danish reference grammars. The main goal of this article is to…[Read more]

Rezension

This essay examines Giambattista Vico’s philology as a contribution to democratic legitimacy. I outline three steps in Vico’s account of the historical and political development of philological knowledge: first, his merger of philosophy and philology, and the effects of that merger on the relative claims of reason and authority; second, his use…[Read more]

The poetry of Teimuraz I’s marks a turning point in Georgian literary history. From 1629–34, the poet-king of Kartli and Kaxetia (eastern Georgia) undertook to produce a Georgian equivalent to Niẓāmī Ganjevī’s famed quintet (khamsa) that stands as one of the major achievements of classical Persian literature. While Teimuraz I imitated the form…[Read more]

(Revised version) Submitted to B. Elan Dresher and Harry van der Hulst (eds.), The Oxford History of Phonology

The German sinologist and general linguist Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) occupies an interesting place at the intersection of several streams of linguistic scholarship at the end of the nineteenth century. As Professor of East-Asian languages at the University of Leipzig from 1878 to 1889 and then Professor for Sinology and General L…[Read more]

Towards the end of his career, August Schleicher (1821–1868), the great consolidator of Indo-European historical-comparative linguistics in the mid-19th century, famously drew explicit parallels between linguistics and the new evolutionary theory of Darwinism. Based on this, it has become customary in linguistic historiography to refer to S…[Read more]

Building on the multivalent meanings of the Arabo- Persian tarjama (‘to interpret’, ‘to translate’, ‘to narrate’), this essay argues for the relevance of Qur’ānic inimitability (i’jāz) to contemporary translation theory. I examine how the translation of Arabic rhetorical theory (‘ilm al-balāgha) into Persian inaugurated new trends within the study…[Read more]

Document contains a preliminary partially annotated bibliography of key works on Ancient Greek dialectology, originally compiled in 2015.

From the early nineteenth century up until the first half of the twentieth century, many leading scholars in the emerging field of linguistics were occupied with what would today be considered a kind of linguistic typology. The various classifications of languages they proposed were generally intertwined with speculation about the “racial” tra…[Read more]

C.K. Ogden (1889–1957) and I.A. Richards’ (1893–1979) The Meaning of Meaning is widely recognised as a classic text of early twentieth-century linguistic semantics and semiotics, but less well known are its links to the ‘logical atomism’ of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), one of the foundational doctrines of analytic philosophy. In this paper a det…[Read more]

Although a relatively minor project in terms of its impact on the broader international language movement, Basic English is interesting for the elaborate semiotic theory that lies behind it. The creator of Basic, Charles Kay Ogden (1889–1957), is today remembered chiefly as co-author of The Meaning of Meaning, a book widely regarded as a classic o…[Read more]

Although now largely forgotten, the international language movement was, from the 1880s to the end of the Second World War, a matter of widespread public interest, as well as a concern of numerous scientists and scholars. The primary goal was to establish a language for international communication, but in the early twentieth century an increasing…[Read more]

A frequently mentioned if somewhat peripheral figure in the historiography of late nineteenth-century linguistics is the German sinologist and general linguist Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893). Today Gabelentz is chiefly remembered for several insights that proved to be productive in the development of subsequent schools and subdisciplines. I…[Read more]

Review of Evaluating Cartesian Linguistics, by Christina Behme

The multifaceted concept of ‘form’ plays a central tole in the linguistic work of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), where it is deeply entwined with aesthetic questions. H. Steinthal’s (1823–1899) interpretation of linguistic form, however, made it the servant of psychology. The Formungstrieb (drive to formation) of Georg von der Gabelentz…[Read more]

A brief account of a translation experiment of the Scottish poet, historian, and fraud John Pinkerton presented in the context of the reception of Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski and his poetry in 18th century Scotland.

The article presents the involvement of the poet William Butler Yeats in the creation of national coinage of the Irish Free State in the late 1920s.

The paper discusses English translators of the poetry of Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski of the early Victorian period. The paper traces Sarbiewski’s transitions within English literary canon and aims at reconstructing the change in attitudes towards the translation process, quality, and assessment.