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Latin : story of a world language
The mother tongue of the Roman Empire and the lingua franca of the West for centuries afterward, Latin survives today primarily in classrooms and texts. Yet this \"dead language\" is unique in the influence it has exerted across centuries and continents. Jürgen Leonhardt offers the story of the first \"world language\", from antiquity to the present.
eBook
Language, Literature and the Construction of a Dutch National Identity (1780-1830)
The final decades of the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth century show the birth of a Dutch national identity. In this time of political upheavel (the battle between Patriots and Orangists, the French occupation years and the period of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands), the study of Dutch language and literature received an important impulse. Many scholars, such as Matthijs Siegenbeek, Johannes Henricus van der Palm, Johannes Kinker and Jan Frans Willems, made an effort to promote the study of Dutch language and culture, by writing studies, anthologies and essays. The study of the national language and literature was considered to be significant, not only for the Dutch sense of self-worth, but also for the recovery of the country, which was - according to many contemporaries declining. - Language, Literature and the Construction of a Dutch National Identity (1780-1830) discusses twelve founding fathers of newly developed cultural nationalism and their various efforts in the creation of a new national identity.
eBook
English begins at Jamestown : narrating the history of a language
'English Begins at Jamestown' explores how people tell and have told the story of English, from its Indo-European origins to its present-day status as a global language. It shows that there are better, worse, and wrong ways to relate the language's history, even if there cannot necessarily be one correct way.
BOOK
Social Variation and the Latin Language
Languages show variations according to the social class of speakers and Latin was no exception, as readers of Petronius are aware. The Romance languages have traditionally been regarded as developing out of a 'language of the common people' (Vulgar Latin), but studies of modern languages demonstrate that linguistic change does not merely come, in the social sense, 'from below'. There is change from above, as prestige usages work their way down the social scale, and change may also occur across the social classes. This book is a history of many of the developments undergone by the Latin language as it changed into Romance, demonstrating the varying social levels at which change was initiated. About thirty topics are dealt with, many of them more systematically than ever before. Discussions often start in the early Republic with Plautus, and the book is as much about the literary language as about informal varieties.
eBook
Language History Questionnaire (LHQ3): An enhanced tool for assessing multilingual experience
The language history questionnaire (LHQ) is an important tool for assessing the linguistic background and language proficiency of multilinguals or second language learners. Previously we developed a generic LHQ based on the most commonly asked questions in published studies (Li, Sepanski & Zhao, 2006) and provided a web-based interface (LHQ 2.0) that has flexibility in functionality, accuracy in data recording, and privacy for users and data (Li, Zhang, Tsai & Puls, 2014). LHQ3 (version 3) introduces new functions, developed in response to many comments/requests from users. One important improvement is the addition of an automatic scoring system, in that the new interface automatically calculates aggregated scores for language proficiency, language dominance, and language immersion levels. Finally, LHQ3 allows researchers to assign different weights to the modules when calculating the aggregated scores, addressing the issue of different focuses that different researchers put on multilingual speakers’ language usage and background.
Journal Article
Holy shit : a brief history of swearing
\"Almost everyone swears, or worries about not swearing, from the two year-old who has just discovered the power of potty mouth to the grandma who wonders why every other word she hears is obscene. Whether they express anger or exhilaration, are meant to insult or to commend, swear words perform a crucial role in language. But swearing is also a uniquely well-suited lens through which to look at history, offering a record of what people care about on the deepest levels of a culture -- what's divine, what's terrifying, and what's taboo. Holy Sh*t tells the story of two kinds of swearing -- obscenities and oaths -- from ancient Rome and the Bible to today. Melissa Mohr takes readers on a journey to discover how \"swearing\" has come to include both testifying with your hand on the Bible and calling someone a *#$&!* when they cut you off on the highway. She explores obscenities in ancient Rome -- which were remarkably similar to our own -- and unearths the history of religious oaths in the Middle Ages, when swearing (or not swearing) an oath was often a matter of life and death. Holy Sh*t also explains the advancement of civility and corresponding censorship of language in the 18th century, considers the rise of racial slurs after World War II, examines the physiological effects of swearing (increased heart rate and greater pain tolerance), and answers a question that preoccupies the FCC, the US Senate, and anyone who has recently overheard little kids at a playground: are we swearing more now than people did in the past?\"--Publisher's description.
Book
The Power of Oratory in the Medieval Muslim World
Oratory and sermons had a fixed place in the religious and civic rituals of pre-modern Muslim societies and were indispensable for transmitting religious knowledge, legitimising or challenging rulers and inculcating the moral values associated with being part of the Muslim community. While there has been abundant scholarship on medieval Christian and Jewish preaching, Linda G. Jones's book is the first to consider the significance of the tradition of pulpit oratory in the medieval Islamic world. Traversing Iberia and North Africa from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, the book analyses the power of oratory, the ritual juridical and rhetorical features of pre-modern sermons and the social profiles of the preachers and orators who delivered them. The biographical and historical sources, which form the basis of this remarkable study, shed light on different regional practices and the juridical debates between individual preachers around correct performance.
eBook