While it has been known for a long time that human languages can change in various ways, it was only in the early 19th century that scholars realized that certain aspects of language change proceed in a surprisingly regular manner, allowing us to reconstruct historical stages of languages which have never been documented in written sources. The…[Read more]

Journal of Historical Linguistics, Volume 11, Issue 2, 357 – 366.

Kaluza’s law is a proposed restriction in the metre of Beowulf against the resolution of light-heavy sequences: words like cyning ‘king’ can only resolve and count as the equivalent of a single heavy syllable under more restricted circumstances than can words such as wudu ‘wood’. There has been debate about how to define these ‘restrict…[Read more]

„Geiht“ mit h und „Blatt, goot, oolt“ mit t? Im Gegensatz zum Hochdeutschen ist das Niederdeutsche bis heute keine normierte Schriftsprache. Wie kann es aber sein, dass offensichtlich falsche Schreibweisen (z. B. das falsche Dehnungs-h im Wort „geiht“) seit Jahren als maßgebend und verbindlich für einen großen Teil des niederdeutsche…[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 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]

Two well preserved Punic texts from Carthage are translated and fully justified according to the scholar’s standard showing that Phoenician letter style texts are actually in the Akkadian empire language just like all other pre-Hellenistic Mediterranean texts. The black temple plaque has a poignant yet sophisticated argument blaming first one d…[Read more]

These seven alphabetic gravestone texts and one-coin texts from Sidon date to the Hellenistic era based upon their religious themes and their Greek Island letter styles. In contrast, one earlier coin style from Sidon from the Persian period has the Phoenician letter style. Their underlying language is Akkadian which was the empire language of…[Read more]

This paper provides evidence that Alphabetic Akkadian was being used in the Greek sphere of influence as an ancient authority temple language (like Latin in near modern Europe) prior to the mid-400’s BCE when the nationalistic fervor surrounding their war with the Persian empire replace it with Greek. Its Greek use is also evidenced by the 499 B…[Read more]

PhD dissertation in Saami linguistics, University of Oulu, Finland, 2009.

Kaluza’s law is a proposed restriction in the metre of Beowulf against the resolution of light-heavy sequences: words like cyning ‘king’ can only resolve and count as the equivalent of a single heavy syllable under more restricted circumstances than can words such as wudu ‘wood’. There has been debate about how to define these ‘restricted…[Read more]

What happens when an exercise succeeds too well? Could a school exercise designed to teach
a foreign language also influence how a discipline interprets its central literary texts?
For centuries in Britain, Latin versification was the pinnacle of both pedagogy and scholarship,
the ultimate proof of a good teacher and a good pupil. Every day,…[Read more]

Giuseppe PEZZINI, Terence and the Verb “To Be” in Latin, «Oxford Classi-cal Monographs», Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, XVI + 355 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-873624-0, 75 £.

Questo volume è il frutto della concreta collaborazione tra la SIAC e il Centro di Studi sulla Fortuna dell’Antico “Emanuele Narducci” di Sestri Levante. Le due istituzioni, insieme con il Liceo “Marconi-Delpino” di Chiavari e “Mediaterraneo S.R.L.” di Sestri Levante, hanno, infatti, proficuamente cooperato per la promozione delle XIV Giornate d…[Read more]

F. Prost, Quintus Cicéron, Petit Manuel de la campagne électorale – Marcus Cicéron, lettres à son frère Quintus 1, 1 et 2

J. Wildberger, The Stoics and the State. Theory – Practice – Context

The panel discussion was moderated by Prof. Jan Miernowski (Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw/Department of French & Italian, University of Wisconsin-Madison).

Review of . STRAUMANN, Crisis and Constitutionalism. Roman Political Thought from the Fall of the Republic to the Age of Revolution – M.C. ALEXANDER, Roman Amoralism Reconsidered. The Political Culture of the Roman Republic and Historians in an Era of Disillusionment

Public talk for International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University (February 24, 2021) https://youtu.be/77oz4tb8r0Y How did Hindu devotees come to worship an Indian goddess in the ‘Chinese Way?’ What was allegedly Chinese about these rituals and how is this related to the goddess’s Buddhist origins? When did Hindus start to think of Ch…[Read more]

Der computergestützte Sprachvergleich (Wu et al. 2020) hat zum Ziel, Sprachvielfalt und Sprachgeschichte mit Hilfe einer Mischung aus computerbasierten und nicht-automatischen aber formalen Methoden zu untersuchen und dadurch grundlegende Fragen zur Entwicklung spezifischer Sprachfamilien (Sagart et al. 2019) oder zur Typologie von Sprachvielfalt…[Read more]