scholarly journals Contrastive grammar in the Renaissance

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raf Van Rooy

Abstract This paper focuses on how Jean Pillot, author of the most popular French grammar of the sixteenth century in terms of editions, took efforts to contrast his native language with Greek. His Gallicæ linguæ institutio (1550/1561), although written in Latin, contains numerous passages where Pillot subtly confronted French with Greek, surveyed in Section 2, in order to give his audience of educated German speakers a clearer view of the idiosyncrasies of French. In Section 3, I analyze why he preferred Greek to the other languages he knew in quite a number of cases, arguing that this subtle contrastive endeavor bore an indirect pedagogical and ideological load. Section 4 discusses the terminological means Pillot used to confront Greek with French, and their origins. In Section 5, I frame Pillot’s appropriation of Greek grammar in the long history of contrastive language studies, with special reference to the pivotal role of sixteenth-century linguistic analysis.

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1(28)) ◽  
pp. 62-76
Author(s):  
Katrin Dkhair ◽  
Polina Klochko

The work explores the portrayal of the sixth president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, in Russian and Ukrainian media sources during the pre-electoral campaign in 2019. The study used network analysis, n-grams’ generation, and LDA-based topic modeling. The study reveals that Russia’s media focused on Zelensky as a media personality, while Ukrainian sources paid attention to the portrayal of a novel popular politician. The target audience of the candidate’s campaign was the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine. Media in Ukraine’s native language were more inclined to mention elections, the role of the other candidate Petro Poroshenko and the nationalist mood, while defining Zelensky as just an ordinary candidate in an electoral race. The article is based on academic resources concerning the history of the development of political and media contexts in Ukraine, paying particular attention to agenda-setting, framing and priming techniques, and the personality of Volodymyr Zelensky.


Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

This book challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics. From an interdisciplinary array of scholars, a consensus has emerged: invariably, epidemics in past times provoked class hatred, blame of the ‘other’, or victimization of the diseases’ victims. It is also claimed that when diseases were mysterious, without cures or preventive measures, they more readily provoked ‘sinister connotations’. The evidence for these assumptions, however, comes from a handful of examples—the Black Death, the Great Pox at the end of the sixteenth century, cholera riots of the 1830s, and AIDS, centred almost exclusively on the US experience. By investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics, reaching back before the fifth-century BCE Plague of Athens to the eruption of Ebola in 2014, this study traces epidemics’ socio-psychological consequences across time and discovers a radically different picture. First, scholars, especially post-AIDS, have missed a fundamental aspect of the history of epidemics: their remarkable power to unify societies across class, race, ethnicity, and religion, spurring self-sacrifice and compassion. Second, hatred and violence cannot be relegated to a time when diseases were mysterious, before the ‘laboratory revolution’ of the late nineteenth century: in fact, modernity was the great incubator of a disease–hate nexus. Third, even with diseases that have tended to provoke hatred, such as smallpox, poliomyelitis, plague, and cholera, blaming ‘the other’ or victimizing disease bearers has been rare. Instead, the history of epidemics and their socio-psychological consequences has been richer and more varied than scholars and public intellectuals have heretofore allowed.


1970 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-35
Author(s):  
Louis J. Lekai

The sixteenth century was a crucial period in the history of French monasticism. In addition to the causes of a general decline throughout Europe, in France two peculiar developments precipitated a nearly fatal collapse of monastic establishments. One was the commendatory system that spread over the whole country following the Concordat of Bologna in 1516. Royally appointed commendatory abbots, whose only concern was the collection of their share of monastic income, contributed much to the moral and material decline of the institutions supposedly under their care. The other and even more devastating calamity was the series of religious and civil wars during the second half of the century that resulted in the pillage and partial or total destruction of hundreds of monasteries.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
KAARLO HAVU

Abstract The article analyses the emergence of decorum (appropriateness) as a central concept of rhetorical theory in the early sixteenth-century writings of Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives. In rhetorical theory, decorum shifted the emphasis from formulaic rules to their creative application in concrete cases. In doing so, it emphasized a close analysis of the rhetorical situation (above all the preferences of the audience) and underscored the persuasive possibilities of civil conversation as opposed to passionate, adversarial rhetoric. The article argues that the stress put on decorum in early sixteenth-century theory is not just an internal development in the history of rhetoric but linked to far wider questions concerning the role of rhetoric in religious and secular lives. Decorum appears as a solution both to the divisiveness of language in the context of the Reformation and dynastic warfare of the early sixteenth century and as an adaptation of the republican tradition of political rhetoric to a changed, monarchical context. Erasmus and Vives maintained that decorum not only suppressed destructive passions and discord, but that it was only through polite and civil rhetoric (or conversation) that a truly effective persuasion was possible in a vast array of contexts.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-269
Author(s):  
Camila Pérez ◽  
Giuseppina Marsico

Indigenous territorial claims are a long-standing concern in the history of Latin America. Land and nature have profound meaning in indigenous thinking, which is neither totally understood nor legitimized by the rest of society. This article is aimed at shedding light on this matter by examining the meanings at stake in the territorial claims of the Mapuche people. The Mapuche are an indigenous group in Chile, who are striving to recover their ancestral land. This analysis will be based on the concept of Umwelt, coined by von Uexküll to refer to the way in which species interpret their world in connection with the meaning-making process. Considering the applications of Umwelt to the human being, the significance assigned to land and nature by the Mapuche people emerges as a system of meaning that persists over time and promotes interdependence between people and the environment. On the other hand, the territorial claim of the Mapuche movement challenges the fragmentation between individuals and their space, echoing proposals from human geography that emphasize the role of people in the constitution of places.


1996 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman Calder

AbstractThis essay offers, in Section 2, a translation of al-Nawawī's presentation of the hierarchy of Muftīs. The context of the passage and its terminology and arguments are explored in the other Sections in order to assess their implications for the general character of Islamic juristic activities. Section 1 identifies two themes central to the text, namely loyalty to madhhab and differentiation of the task of the teaching jurist and the muftī. The first of these is elaborated in Section 3, which points to formal qualities of presentation and argument which assert the hermeneutical continuity of the school tradition; and in Section 4, which deals with the pivotal role of the founding imām in the legitimation of the school tradition. Section 5 takes up the terms taqlīd and ijtihād and shows that al-Nawawī's usage points towards a complex resolution of the recent debate about the open/closed door of ijtihād. The last Section returns to the original two themes to make two suggestions: (1) that taqlīd may be assessed as a principal of vitality within a hermeneutical tradition; (2) that the author-jurist (not the practising muftī) is the dominant creative agent within the ongoing juristic traditions.


Author(s):  
Mª Isabel Romero Ruiz

The presence of Empire in the Victorian period and its aftermath has become a new trope in neo-Victorian studies, introducing a postcolonial approach to the re-writing of the Victorian past. This, combined with the metaphor of the sea as a symbol of British colonial and postcolonial maritime power, makes of Joseph O’Connor’s novel Star of the Sea a story of love, vulnerability and identity. Set in the winter of 1847, it tells the story of the voyage of a group of Irish refugees travelling to New York trying to escape from the Famine. The colonial history of Ireland and its long tradition of English dominance becomes the setting of the characters’ fight for survival. Parallels with today’s refugees can be established after Ireland’s transformation into an immigration country. Following Judith Butler’s and Sarah Bracke’s notions of vulnerability and resistance together with ideas about ‘the other’ in postcolonial neo-Victorianism, this article aims to analyse the role of Empire in the construction of an Irish identity associated with poverty and disease, together with its re-emergence and reconstruction through healing in a contemporary globalised scenario. For this purpose, I resort to Edward Said’s and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s ideas about imperialism and new imperialism along with Elizabeth Ho’s concept of ‘the Neo-Victorian-at-sea’ and some critics’ approaches to postcolonial Gothic. My main contention throughout the text will be that vulnerability in resistance can foster healing.


Author(s):  
Delyash N. Muzraevа ◽  

Introduction. The written heritage of Kalmyk Buddhist priests, their daily practices, liturgical repertoire still remain a poorly studied page in the history of Buddhism among Mongolic peoples in the 20th century. The survived collections, clusters of religious texts prove instrumental in revealing most interesting aspects of their activities, efforts aimed at preservation of Buddhist teachings, their popularization and dissemination among believers. Goals. The paper examines two Oirat copies of the Precepts of the Omniscient [Manjushri] from N. D. Kichikov’s collection, transliterates and translates the original texts, provides a comparative analysis, and notes differences therein that had resulted from the scribe’s work, thereby introducing the narratives into scientific circulation. Materials. The article describes two Oirat manuscripts bound in the form of a notebook and contained in different bundles/collections of Buddhist religious texts stored at Ketchenery Museum of Local History and Lore. As is known, the collection is largely compiled from texts that belonged to the famous Kalmyk Buddhist monk Namka (N. D. Kichikov). Results. The analysis of the two Oirat texts with identical titles — Precepts of the Omniscient [Manjushri] — shows that their contents coincide generally but both the texts contain fragmented omissions (separate words, one or several sentences) that are present in the other. At the same time, when omitting fragments of the text addressed to the monastic community, the scribe was obviously guided by that those would be superfluous for the laity. Thus, our comparative analysis of the two manuscript copies demonstrates the sometimes dramatic role of the scribe in transmitting Buddhist teachings.


Author(s):  
Ying-shih Yü

This essay examines how the most notable Neo-Confucian scholar Wang Yangming (1472-1529) re-oriented his Confucian project in the context of Ming despotism. It argues that Confucianism took a decidedly new turn in the sixteenth century and that Wang Yangming was at the center of this development from the sixteenth century to the early decades of the eighteenth. Details how Wang shifted the earlier central role of Confucian intellectuals in implementing reforms under the imperial support to enlightening the ordinary Chinese people, specifically including the merchant class, that they could realize the Dao or the Moral Way in their daily lives. This shift not only led to a new era of social and political thinking in the history of Confucianism, but also to the rise of the merchant class to unprecedented social and cultural prominence in the 16th century.


Author(s):  
Anders Lundgren

The reception of Mendeleev’s periodic system in Sweden was not a dramatic episode. The system was accepted almost without discussion, but at the same time with no exclamation marks or any other outbursts of enthusiasm. There are but a few weak short-lived critical remarks. That was all. I will argue that the acceptance of the system had no overwhelming effect on chemical practice in Sweden. At most, it strengthened its characteristics. It is actually possible to argue that chemistry in Sweden was more essential for the periodic system than the other way around. My results might therefore suggest that we perhaps have to reevaluate the role of Mendeleev’s system in the history of chemistry. Chemistry in Sweden at the end of the nineteenth century can be characterized as a classifying science, with chemists very skilled in analysis, and as mainly an atheoretical science, which treated theories at most only as hypothesis—the slogan of many chemists being “facts persist, theories vanish.” Thanks to these characteristics, by the end of the nineteenth century, chemistry in Sweden had developed into, it must be said, a rather boring chemistry. This is obviously not to say that it is boring to study such a chemistry. Rather, it gives us an example of how everyday science, a part of science too often neglected but a part that constitutes the bulk of all science done, is carried out. One purpose of this study is to see how a theory, considered to be important in the history of chemistry, influenced everyday science. One might ask what happened when a daring chemistry met a boring chemistry. What happened when a theory, which had been created by a chemist who has been described as “not a laboratory chemist,” met an atheoretical experimental science of hard laboratory work and, as was said, the establishment of facts? Furthermore, could we learn something about the role of the periodic system per se from the study of such a meeting? Mendeleev’s system has often been considered important for teaching, and his attempts to write a textbook are often taken as the initial step in the chain of thoughts that led to the periodic system.


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