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]

(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]

This syllabus for a very standard course (lit survey of British literature from the Romantic period to the present) is unusual only because its assigned texts are all available open-access. I worked with one of the reference librarians and a work-study student at Lesley’s Sherrill Library to get academically sound editions that were also open…[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]

Reading is a complex and difficult skill. The main difficulty beginning readers face is learning which letters represent which sounds—and then getting used to those patterns by reading them, again and again, in different combinations and contexts. It takes practice to learn how to read. Research also shows that the easier reading is, the more l…[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]

Metadaten stellen für offene Bildungsmaterialien einen essenziellen Bestandteil dar, erfahren bei der Produktion von OER aber leider immer noch nicht genügend Beachtung. Der vorliegende Beitrag hat sich daher zum Ziel gesetzt, eine historisch-diachrone Perspektive auf die Entwicklung von Metadaten im Allgemeinen und insbesondere auf den O…[Read more]

Der Beitrag thematisiert die Genese des im Sommer 2017 an der Universität Hamburg gestarteten openLabs, das sich als virtueller Nexus zum breiten Themenfeld der Openness in zahlreichen Facetten und mit Ziel der mittelfristigen Etablierung einer Practice of Open Science (POS) versteht und die Ansätze bestehender Projekte zielgruppenübergreifend vernetzt.

Syllabus for an introductory academic writing course (WRIT 101: Writing in the Liberal Arts) taught in Spring 2017 at Marymount Manhattan College. The course was organized around the theme of Walking: Critical Encounters in Public, and includes work by Garnette Cadogan, Virginia Woolf, Cecile Emeke, Jean Rhys, Michel de Certeau, James Baldwin,…[Read more]

Traditional pedagogy for learning alphabetic principles focuses on introducing the alphabet a letter at a time in a traditional order—the ABCs for English speakers; ཀ་ཁ་ག་ང་། for Tibetan. What educational research has shown, however, is that this form of education can actually be disadvantageous to the beginning reader. Instead, students b…[Read more]