Lexicostatistics avant la lettre

2020 ◽  
pp. 183-192
Author(s):  
Raf Van Rooy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
Linguistic Distance ◽  
Linguistic Data ◽  
Limited Success ◽  
Innovative Methodology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Basic Vocabulary

Chapter 14 presents a case study from an angle different from that of philology, taking the historian Johann Christoph Gatterer’s ideas on linguistic diversity as its object. It not only serves as another telling example of the tendency towards systematization, but also, and especially, represents a climax in eighteenth-century attempts at rationalizing the language / dialect distinction. Proposing an embryonic lexicostatistic method, Gatterer tried to find an objective way to use linguistic data in writing an encompassing history of tribes and nations, in particular their prehistory. Starting from a basic vocabulary set, Gatterer attempted to quantify linguistic distance. In doing so, he divided the kinship continuum into four sections: unrelated languages, related languages, dialects, and closely related dialects. His innovative methodology, prefiguring modern lexicostatistic approaches, had only limited success, however. Gatterer failed to put it into practice, and the historian was criticized for his ahistorical method by the grammarian Johann Christoph Adelung.

Court Jews, Printers, Book Publishing, and the Beginning of the Haskalah in the German Lands: The Life History of the Wulffian Printing Press as a Case-Study

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-55
Author(s):  
Gad Freudenthal
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Life History ◽  
Book Publishing ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
Continuous Contact ◽  
The Press ◽  
History Of ◽  
Guide Of The Perplexed

Abstract This article presents the history of a printing press that operated at several places near Berlin during the first half of the eighteenth century, culminating in the epoch-making reprinting of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed in 1742. The press was established in Dessau in 1694 by the court Jew Moses Wulff (1661–1729), and was run by several printers, notably the convert Israel b. Abraham (fl. 1715–1752). Using the trajectory of the Wulff press as a case study, I examine the relations between scholars, patrons of learning (especially court Jews), printers, and book publishing. The inquiry will highlight the considerable role that court Jews played in shaping the Jewish bookshelf, notably by choosing which books (reprints and original) would be funded. Surprisingly perhaps, although court Jews were in continuous contact with the environing culture, they did not usually favor the printing of non-traditional Jewish works that would favor a rapprochement.

scholarly journals The Parthenon, Pericles and King Solomon: a case study of Ottoman archaeological imagination in Greece

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-274
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Key Fowden
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The City

What made Athens different from other multi-layered cities absorbed into the Ottoman Empire was the strength of its ancient reputation for learning that echoed across the Arabic and Ottoman worlds. But not only sages were remembered and Islamized in Athens; sometimes political figures were too. In the early eighteenth century a mufti of Athens, Mahmud Efendi, wrote a rarely studiedHistory of the City of Sages (Tarih-i Medinetü’l-Hukema)in which he transformed Pericles into a wise leader on a par with the Qur'anic King Solomon and linked the Parthenon mosque to Solomon's temple in Jerusalem.

scholarly journals Translation in Intersystemic Interaction: A Case Study of Eighteenth-Century Russia1

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergey Tyulenev
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Systems Theory ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Social Systems Theory ◽  
System Environment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Systemic Functioning

The article considers the applicability of Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory to the study of translation. The focus of this paper is the intersystemic aspect of translation’s social involvements. Translation is considered as a social subsystem acting as a boundary phenomenon (opening/closing the system) and as a mechanism of the system/environment throughput. The theory of social-systemic functioning of translation is exemplified by a case study of the translation history of eighteenth-century Russia.

scholarly journals THE 1951 DIPLOMATIC GIFT: THE ROLE OF A GERMAN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY HANUKKAH LAMP IN ISRAELI-AMERICAN RELATIONS

ARTis ON ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 67-77
Author(s):  
Shir Kochavi
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
The Gift ◽  
History Of

A diplomatic gift in the form of a Hanukkah Lamp, given to President Harry Truman by the Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion in 1951 was selected for this occasion by museum personnel from the Bezalel Museum in Jerusalem and the Jewish Museum in New York. Based on primary sources found in archives in Israel and in the United States, this case study investigates the process of objects exchange between two museums, orchestrated on the basis of an existing collegial relationship, and illustrates how the Hanukkah Lamp becomes more than itself and signifies both the history of the Jewish people and the mutual obligations between the two nations. Drawing on the theories of Marcel Mauss, Arjun Appadurai, and Igor Kopytoff on the notion of the gift, the article highlights the layers of meanings attributed to a gifted object.

‘Just put it online’: The Taylor White Project as a digitization case study

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Zinger
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Interactive Visualizations ◽  
Digital Collection ◽  
History Of ◽  
Source Materials

Creating access to digital surrogates of primary source materials has spurred the growth of history of science as a field. Enabling and supporting virtual access requires an understanding of the behind-the-scenes requirements of a digitization project. Using McGill's Taylor White Project as a case study, this article reveals how such a project is managed, to result in a unique digital collection that supports research in both the humanities and the sciences. The workflows described transformed a collection of 938 eighteenth-century natural history drawings from a relatively inaccessible archive to a searchable and browsable digital collection, complete with contextualizing interactive visualizations. Understanding this process reveals some of the ways in which digitized data can create new avenues for questioning and examining information.

TALL HISTORIES: HEIGHT AND GEORGIAN MASCULINITIES

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 79-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew McCormack
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Human Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Health And Nutrition ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

ABSTRACTHeight is rarely taken seriously by historians. Demographic and archaeological studies tend to explore height as a symptom of health and nutrition, rather than in its own right, and cultural studies of the human body barely study it at all. Its absence from the history of gender is surprising, given that it has historically been discussed within a highly gendered moral language. This paper therefore explores height through the lens of masculinity and focuses on the eighteenth century, when height took on a peculiar cultural significance in Britain. On the one hand, height could be associated with social status, political power and ‘polite’ refinement. On the other, it could connote ambition, militarism, despotism, foreignness and even castration. The article explores these themes through a case-study of John Montagu, earl of Sandwich, who was famously tall and was frequently caricatured as such. As well as exploring representations of the body, the paper also considers corporeal experiences and biometric realities of male height. It argues that histories of masculinity should study both representations of gender and their physical manifestations.

Semiosis of intercultural cooking: The nineteenth century travel literature as a case study

Semiotica ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (211) ◽  
pp. 45-57
Author(s):  
Mohamed Bernoussi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Culture Shock ◽  
The Other ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Topography

AbstractMy interest in culinary dates back to approximately fifteen years ago when I collaborated with [Béatrice Fink 1999. The cultural topography of food. Special issue, Eighteenth century life 23(2)] on a special issue of Eighteenth Century Life on food topography. I proposed then a study on the reactions of an English physician to Moroccan food, mainly couscous and tea. I continued working on other studies, and I realized how much a semiotics of food could serve the history of mentalities and private lives. While doing my research, I discovered the works of Jean Louis Flandrin 1986. La distinction par le goût. In Roger Chartier (ed.), Histoire de la vie privée de la Renaissance aux Lumières, vol. 3, 267–309. Paris: Seuil and Flandrin 1992. Chronique de Platine: Pour une gastronomie historique. Paris: Odile Jacob), who had contributed to the same volume directed by Fink and also represented a great inspiration for me. I felt that I was concerned with the study of the relation with the Other, with culture shock or encounter through travelers’ reactions to the food or the culinary, the prepared dish, and the consumed product in ceremonies or in private occasions. While thinking about these points, I asked myself the following questions: in which way does the reaction to food reveal the attitude of the traveler, his prejudices on the culture, the society, the food or the dish in question? In which way would reaction to food reveal his culture? This article explores these and other related issues.

scholarly journals Inferring linguistic transmission between generations at the scale of individuals

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentin Thouzeau ◽  
Antonin Affholder ◽  
Philippe Mennecier ◽  
Paul Verdu ◽  
Frédéric Austerlitz
Keyword(s):  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
Simulated Data ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Linguistic Data ◽  
Demographic Models ◽  
History Of ◽  
Best Fitting ◽  
Approximate Bayesian ◽  
Individual Scale ◽  
The Individual

AbstractHistorical linguistics highly benefited from recent methodological advances inspired by phylogenetics. Nevertheless, no currently available method uses contemporaneous within-population linguistic diversity to reconstruct the history of human populations. Here, we develop an approach inspired from population genetics to perform historical linguistic inferences from linguistic data sampled at the individual scale, within a population. We built four demographic models of linguistic transmission at this scale, each model differing by the number of teachers involved during the language acquisition, and the relative roles of these teachers. We then compared the simulated data obtained with these models with real contemporaneous linguistic data sampled in Tajik speakers in Central Asia, an area known for its high within-population linguistic diversity, using approximate Bayesian computation methods. With these statistical methods, we were able to select the models that best explained the data, and inferred the best-fitting parameters under these selected models, demonstrating the feasibility of using contemporaneous within-population linguistic diversity to infer historical features of human cultural evolution.

Presenting “Truth” in Early Eighteenth-Century Travel Narratives

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-46
Author(s):  
Shef Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Narrative Theory ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Ascension Island ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Early Novel

This essay clarifies the bibliographical history of the three published accounts of the sufferings of a Dutch sailor abandoned on Ascension Island in 1726 for sodomy, but is ultimately less concerned with what actually happened than with how the story was represented in each of three versions and with what those changes might tell us about shifts in expectations of fiction readers between 1726 and 1740. It also examines how later critics have responded to the story to demonstrate that ideas about credibility are relative and socially determined. While narrative theory generally argues that “the more information we have on a narrator, the more concrete will be our sense of the quality and distinctness of his or her voice,” this case study questions that relationship, at least for the early novel, when narrative techniques and readerly practices were still being developed.

scholarly journals Philomaths, Herschel, and the myth of the self-taught man

2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 207-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Winterburn
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
University Education ◽  
Learning Science ◽  
Collective Effort ◽  
History Of ◽  
William Herschel ◽  
Practice Of Science

The role of technicians and background characters in the historical practice of science is slowly gaining recognition. This paper looks at the collective effort involved in learning science, using as my case study the eighteenth-century musician turned astronomer, William Herschel. Lacking a university education, Herschel, like many contemporaries, presented himself as self-taught, thereby hiding his engagement with a rich network of didactic resources. Placing Herschel's story within the history of pedagogy, I argue that this network, previously discussed only in the context of popular or marketplace science, was an important resource for science education at its highest level.

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