in Symposium: On Quentin Skinner, from Method to Politics (conference held for 40 years after "Meaning") - Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 73, No. 1 (January 2012), pp. 111-126 -- downloaded pdf to Note

Doing Our Own Thinking for Ourselves: On Quentin Skinner's Genealogical Turn - in Symposium: On Quentin Skinner, from Method to Politics (conference held for 40 years after "Meaning") -- Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 73, No. 1 (January 2012), pp. 71-82 -- downloaded pdf to Note

Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 73, No. 4 (October 2012), pp. 537-557 -- fabulous bibliography of both primary and recent secondary sources -- downloaded pdf to Note

History and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 4, Theme Issue 33: Proof and Persuasion in History (Dec., 1994), pp. 5-25 -- Since William Jones announced the kinship of Sanskrit and the European languages, a massive body of scholarship has illuminated the development of the so-called "Indo-European" language group. This new historical philology has enormous technical achievements to its credit. But almost from the start, it became entangled with prejudices and myths - with efforts to recreate not only the lost language, but also the lost - and superior - civilization of the Indo-European ancestors. This drive to determine the identity and nature of the first language of humanity was deeply rooted in both near eastern and western traditions. -- A new history of the European languages developed, one which traced them back to the language of the barbarian Scythians and emphasized the connections between Persian and European languages. It came to seem implausible that the European languages derived from He-brew. By the eighteenth century, in short, all the preconditions were present for a discovery that the ancestors of the Europeans, like the common ancestor of their languages, had been independent of Semitic influence. A modern scholarly thesis whose political and intellectual consequences are still working themselves out reveals the continuing impact of a millennial tradition of speculation about language and history. -- downloaded pdf to Note

I’ve been reading Simon Franklin’s Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c.950-1300, and I found the following passage so sensible and interesting I…

English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its…

This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago. The dates beside a word indicate the earliest year for which there is a surviving written record of that word (in English, unless otherwise indicated). This should be taken as approximate, especially before about 1700, since a word may have been used in conversation for hundreds of years before it turns up in a manuscript that has had the good fortune to survive the centuries. The basic sources of this work are Weekley's "An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English," Klein's "A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language," "Oxford English Dictionary" (second edition), "Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology," Holthausen's "Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Englischen Sprache," and Kipfer and Chapman's "Dictionary of American Slang." A full list of print sources used in this compilation can be found here. Since this dictionary went up, it has benefited from the suggestions of dozens of people I have never met, from around the world. Tremendous thanks and appreciation to all of you.

Of course, some words here don't really exist in German, but this mirrors the situation of a speaker of Cantonese in Hong Kong. To match up German with Cantonese and English with Mandarin works on so many levels (I won't explain now), but to better illustrate the situation to a native speaker of English, let's flip things around and proceed to … Scenario B: Imagine a situation where all speakers of English are required to employ German for written communication. The sentence "my parents have acquired a pet" is, in correct German, the following: "Meine Eltern haben ein Haustier erworben." Now when native speakers of English talk amongst each other, they still say: "My parents (have)² acquired a pet." but they're not allowed to write such a vulgar thing! Instead they only ever encounter German in prestigious newspapers. They are also taught, in school, to read aloud the German sentence as: "My elders have a house deer ur-wharven."

August 23, 2015 @ 7:23 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Humor, Usage
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In 1711, long before E.B. White over-interpreted the Fowler…

Dryden inventing the rule re prepositions misplaced (end of sentence or independent clause) -- he didn't just criticize Jonson, he went back to revise a lot of his own writing for the "error"

Tracks when "revolution" started to be applied to the American war for independence -- Abbé Raynal and Tom Paine debates in print seem to be when "revolution" ceased to refer exclusively to the Glorious Revolution

They're mostly from the Okd English side of the Old English-Norman French combo -- associated with lower status -- interesting examples of the class divide -- e.g. animal names from Old English (sheep, cow, pig) but meats of animals from Norman French (moutton, boeuf, porc)

translated by John Zvesper - French version Nov 2012 -- A highly respected figure in African studies, Jack Goody has become a distinctive voice in the torrent of academic critiques of western ethnocentrism. His work, spanning more than sixty years, has been based on a single ambition: comparison, for the sake of more accurately locating European history within Eurasian and world history. -- serves as a useful intro to stages of debates within the post-WWII social sciences -- he retired in 1984, though a very active retirement -- downloaded pdf to Note

John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603-1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). -- downloaded pdf to Note

The US version was published earlier this year ... Edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood, the 1,300-page Dictionary retains the original introduction, most of the entries, and an orientation toward Europe, but it has also been adjusted and supplemented for US audiences. Apter’s robust preface documents the enormous complexity and scale involved in translating intraduisibles. One of the most provocative and important contributions of the Vocabulaire is its insistence that philosophical concepts, often assumed to be transhistorical and universal, in fact have a history in languages. The editions, adaptations, and translations of the project are important too, however, because they show that philosophical concepts have a history in books as well. The Vocabulaire may be a multilingual project, whose entries collate and compare terms in more than a dozen languages, but the editions are not all multilingual in the same way and for the same reasons. Whereas the Ukrainian editors sought to expand the vocabulary and prestige of their language, their US counterparts were more concerned to acknowledge and mitigate Anglophone dominance. The books are different structurally and economically as well as linguistically. The Ukrainian and Arabic editions have appeared only in parts, while the US edition appears as a whole. In tongues with fewer readers and fewer resources, publishing one part helps to fund a subsequent part. That kind of funding is not necessary for most books published in English. -- Pocket

For its competition of 1771, the Berlin Academy of Sciences asked: "Supposing men abandoned to their natural faculties, are they in a position to invent language? And by what means will they arrive at this invention?" The winning essay was Herder's "On the Origin of Language." This was actually the Academy's 2nd on language. In 1759 they asked: "What is the reciprocal influence of the opinions of people on language, and of language on opinions?" The winner was the orientalist Johann David Michaelis. Lifschitz's lucid and engaging book is about the 1759 contest, as he considers the historical, philosophical, and political circumstances that led to its proposal and the broader scholarly views of Michaelis. -- While one might quibble with Lifschitz's attempt to find deep roots in the Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy for the 1759 Academy question, there is no doubting that in Berlin of the 1750s a number of thinkers took an active interest in language, its role in framing social institutions, and its relation to the mind, primarily under the influence of the work of Condillac and Rousseau. These include the president of the Academy, Maupertuis, and Moses Mendelssohn There was also lively discussion among Academy members regarding the (synchronic) connection between language and opinions, esp French as the language of the Academy. -- Already in the 1750s ...mainstream Enlightenment figures recognized the "linguistic rootedness of all human forms of life" and the importance of language as a "tool of cognition". Lifschitz rightly contends [this counters the story that such a view ], with its focus on the historical and non-rational aspects of human nature, [came from counter-Enlightenment figures] such as Herder and Hamann. [This directly] challenge[s] the characterization ... in Isaiah Berlin's seminal studies [as well as more recent studies] such as Michael Forster's work on Herder's philosophy of language. ...Herder's claim, as characterized by Forster, that "thought is essentially dependent upon and bounded by language" and that "one cannot think unless one has a language and one can only think what one can express linguistically" must be taken in the broader context of these earlier philosophical (and political) debates.

Downloaded pdf to Note -- claims that most attention has been on Scandinavia, especially the Swedish court in 16thC and 17thC. Article extends inquiry to other parts of Europe that were beginning to claim ancient Gothic heritage - eg Poland, Grotius re Batavia etc