Are you tripping over your own feet, incapable of advancing even a single metre, when it comes to understanding the technicalities of the feet and metres of pre-modern Islamicate poetry? Then you should probably not consult Nevāʾī’s Meter of Meters, since you are better off with the works of a Wheeler Thackston or a Finn Thiesen… If, howe…[Read more]

Henrietta Liston, wife of a British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century, recorded her travels in a private journal, now held in the National Library of Scotland. Together with academics from Bilkent University in Ankara, the Library is currently working to publish the journal for the first time. Dora Petherbridge,…[Read more]

Comentamos algunos elementos de autoengendramienento en el poema épico anglosajón ´Beowulf´. El motivo del autoengendramiento literario emerge espontáneamente allí a partir de la naturaleza misma de la narración—o quizá más bien vemos la emergencia natural de la narración artística a partir de las prácticas sociales que dieron lugar a ella, práct…[Read more]

As neural language models begin to change aspects of everyday life, they understandably attract criticism. This position paper was commissioned for a roundtable at Princeton University, dedicated to one of the most influential critiques: “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru,…[Read more]

Comentamos, con ocasión del libro de Ángel Rivera ‘Arqueología del lenguaje’, los principales conceptos de arqueología cognitiva y sus posibles desarrollos en relación en particular a las aportaciones de la lingüística cognitiva y la narratología.

This article examines the unpublished memoirs of Sevim Sertel O’Brien, a journalist and daughter of prominent journalists and intellectuals Sabiha and Zekeriya Sertel. The memoirs, written in English and told as bedtime stories to O’Brien’s Turkish-American children in the 1950s and 1960s, provide a unique lens on the early history of the Turkish…[Read more]

With the introduction of the horse-drawn tramway in 1871, the citizens of Istanbul were forced to reckon with a new type of public space—the crowded confines of the tramcar. This article focuses on the removal of a curtain that separated men and women on public transit in 1923, analyzing the discourses that shaped the decision and the way in w…[Read more]

English abstract: A vindication of the wide-ranging perspective of Herbert Spencer’s theories of cosmic evolutionism, as an intellectual enterprise far more ambitious and comprehensive than that of his contemporary Charles Darwin. (A retropost from 2011). _________________________________________________________________________________ Spanish…[Read more]

Purportedly in response to a request by his unnamed beloved one, the late 18th-century Ottoman poet Ḥasan-i Yāver wrote Poetry’s Artistry, a 441-verse mathnawī that offers some hands-on advice for trying one’s hand at poetry. As tashbīh, jinās, kināya, taḍādd, taḍmīn, ilmām, iltifāt, tardīd, ishtibāh, tawriya, īhām, takhmīs, tarkīb-band,…[Read more]