In this article, the author explores basket divination, a technique found in Zambia and neighboring countries, as a form of material religion. Mores specifically, the author shows that in basket divination the idea of objectivity (objective knowledge) is directly associated with the materiality of the oracle used for divining. In the Luvale…[Read more]

This chapter on witchcraft in northwest Zambia shows that forms of asking and giving may be deployed to suspend suspicion about the motives of others, even as they possess the potential to kill. When a woman asks a witch for a gift of salt to flavor her food, the witch feigns generosity but forces that woman to join the coven in recompense. In…[Read more]

Instead of asking what evil is, let us see where evil takes us. Based on many conversations on the topic of witchcraft in northwest Zambia, Africa—conversations in which witchcraft is presented from the perspective of the bewitched—the concept of evil takes us to a ghastly realm of destruction and transfiguration where the discourse of mor…[Read more]

On the phonological adaption of Armenian loanwords starting with plosives or fricatives in the Turkish dialects of the province Erzurum.

On conditional forms in the dialects of Erzumrum province, conditional constructions and temporal clauses.

The present article investigates a type of complex sentence in Turkish where the predicate
of the embedded clause is based on a conditional form followed by the particle de or
sometimes bile. The syntactic and semantic peculiarities of this construction in Turkish
are outlined according to the exhaustive description of concessive conditionals…[Read more]

There is a rich corpus of texts written in Zapotec during the Mexican colonial period that remains relatively understudied. The nature of the corpus poses significant challenges to would-be readers; for example, the texts were written using the Roman alphabet with few standardized spelling conventions, resulting in a large number of homographs and…[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]

‘Narrative Theory’ is an online introduction to classical structuralist narratological analysis. This preliminary section provides an introduction to the notion of level of analysis in narrative, and examines a number of theories bearing on the structure of the fabula (Aristotle, Tomashevsky, Bal) and of the story (Genette), with attention to the…[Read more]

A basic sketch of the historical phonology of the Lycian language from Proto-Indo-European, originally compiled for a “Lycian Self-Help” reading group at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge (Easter Term 2015), organised by Dr. Philippa Steele. The sketch is based primarily upon the accounts given in H. Craig Melchert’s Anatolian…[Read more]

Handout for a supplementary lecture to the course “Alexander’s Legacy: Greek as a World Language” (Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, 2014).

Document contains a complete parsing of R̥g-veda 2.33, originally compiled for a course on Vedic at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge (Lent term 2014).

This document contains a brief survey of Sanskrit nominal compounds, originally compiled for personal use, later used as a teaching handout.

Document contains a now slightly outdated annotated bibliography of Vedic linguistics, originally compiled for a course on Vedic at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge (Lent term 2014).

Document contains a complete parsing and etymological analysis of R̥g-veda 1.32, originally compiled for a course on Vedic at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge (Lent term 2014).

Document contains an etymological glossary of R̥g-veda 1.1, originally compiled for a course on Vedic at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge (Lent term 2014).

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

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

Document contains a complete parsing and partial etymological analysis of R̥g-veda 1.85, originally compiled for a course on Vedic at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge (Lent term 2014).

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]