Tam o’ Shanter, a great narrative poem written by Roberts Burns, is written in Scots and as such is difficult to access by standard English speakers and non-natives alike. This monograph offers an account of the language of Tam as characterised by a significant number of distinctive lexical and phonological items related to Old Norse. It is c…[Read more]

Tam o’ Shanter, a great narrative poem written by Roberts Burns, is written in Scots and as such is difficult to access by standard English speakers and non-natives alike. Old Norse influences form an essential part of the fabric of Tam, and the poem can only be fully understood when these are identified and described. This article presents a n…[Read more]

An commentary upon the poet Spencer Reese, and more specifically, upon Reece’s “addresses” in his book “The Clerk’s Tale: Poems” (Houghton Mifflin, 2004) in light of Barbara Johnson’s work on the “apostrophe” in her book chapter “Toys R Us,” in her book “Persons and Things” (Harvard University Press, 2008), and also in light of Graham Harman’s…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: El concepto de ‘autor implícito’ (implied author) lo difundió Wayne Booth en ‘La Retórica de la Ficción’ (1961) pero, como veremos, algo apuntaron al respecto con anterioridad otros autores. Aquí señalamos más en concreto el precedente de Hegel. ______…[Read more]

The weblog Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice, published on the Hypotheses platform for scientific blogging, offers tutorials and discussion notes on computer-assisted approaches to the history and diversity of languages. A substantial part of its content is contributed as part of the ERC Starting Grant “Computer-Assisted Language C…[Read more]

The dual curriculum model ubiquitous to Orthodox Jewish day schools in North America typically bifurcates into religious (Judaic) studies and general studies. While most classes generally fit into one of those two halves of the curriculum, some classes are not intuitively categorized as wholly belonging to one part over the other. One of those…[Read more]

Historical language comparison for the purpose of identifying cognates and sound correspondences in multilingual wordlists which can later be used to infer phylogenetic trees can be conveniently carried out in a framework of computer-assisted language comparison (see http://calc.digling.org), using tools for automatic inference, like LingPy…[Read more]

This article reflects on the pedagogical legacy of bell hooks.

In a recent issue of the Journal of Language Evolution, Syrjänen et al. (2021) investigate the suitability of computing Cummins and McInerney’s (2011) TIGER rates for estimating the tree-likeness of linguistic datasets compiled for phylogenetic reconstruction. The authors test the TIGER rates on a diverse sample of simulated data, which by and lar…[Read more]

While many in academia around the U.S. may anchor themselves in cynical opposition to the proliferation of neoliberal discourse and the policies that accompany, I propose that language departments are in a uniquely privileged position within the humanities to assert the value of our programs within the neoliberal paradigm. Specifically, the…[Read more]

Für ein Gespräch über die Themen Political Correctness, Identitätspolitik, Streitkultur und die Rolle der politischen Bildung kamen im Juli 2021 Saba-Nur Cheema von der Bildungsstätte Anne Frank und Dr. Karsten Schubert von der Universität Freiburg in einem Zoom-Raum zusammen. Die Fragen stellten Prof. Dr. Beate Rosenzweig und Petra Barz, beide…[Read more]

There are hundreds of alphabetic texts in Zapotec languages dating back to the 16th century. Today, however, Zapotec speakers are generally unable to read these texts, due to lack of access to the texts and an unfamiliarity with the orthographic practices. Moreover, significant changes have taken place in the grammar in the intervening centuries.…[Read more]