Chapter 14. Historical sociolinguistics and the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration

The mid-20th century consensus regarding Hume’s critique of reported miracles has broken down dramatically in recent years thanks to the application of probabilistic analysis to the issue and the rediscovery of its history. Progress from this point forward is likely to be made along one or more of three fronts. There is wide room for interdisciplinary collaboration, work that will bring together scholars with expertise in religion, psychology, philosophy, and empirical science. There is a great deal of work still to be done in formal analysis, making use of the tools of modern probability theory to model questions about testimony and inference. And the recovery and study of earlier works on the subject—works that should never have been forgotten—can significantly enrich our understanding of the underlying issues.

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Scribes, Repertoires, and Variation

10.1093/oso/9780198768104.003.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Eitan Grossman ◽

Jennifer Cromwell

Keyword(s):

Language Variation ◽

Spoken Language ◽

Historical Sociolinguistics ◽

Written Texts ◽

Linguistic Practices ◽

Culturally Embedded

As in spoken language, variation abounds in written texts. In the latter, linguistic and extralinguistic variation coexists: one finds variation in lexical and grammatical features, as well as in other textual parameters such as orthography, phraseology and formulary, palaeography, layout, and formatting. Such variation occurs both within the written output of individuals and across broader corpora that represent ‘communities’ of diverse types. To encapsulate this, we use the inclusive term ‘scribal repertoires’, a concept that is intended to cover the entire set of linguistic and non-linguistic practices that are prone to variation within and between manuscripts, while placing focus on scribes as socially and culturally embedded agents, whose choices are reflected in texts. This conceptualization of scribal variation, inspired by the relatively recent field of historical sociolinguistics, is applied to a range of phenomenon in the scribal cultures of premodern Egypt, across languages and socio-historical settings.

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Scribal Repertoires in Egypt from the New Kingdom to the Early Islamic Period

10.1093/oso/9780198768104.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Point Of View ◽

Late Antique ◽

Historical Sociolinguistics ◽

Islamic Period ◽

The People ◽

Modern Egypt ◽

Early Islamic Period ◽

Early Islamic ◽

Point Of Departure

This volume deals with the possibility of glimpsing pre-modern and early modern Egyptian scribes, the people who actually produced ancient documents, through the ways in which they organized and wrote those documents. Breaking with the traditional conception of variation in scribal texts as ‘free’ or indicative of ‘corruption’, this volume reconceptualizes scribal variation in pre-modern Egypt from the point of view of contemporary historical sociolinguistics, seeing scribes as agents embedded in particular geographical, temporal, and sociocultural environments. This volume comprises a set of studies of scribal variation, beginning from the well-established domain of scribal variation in pre-modern English as a methodological point of departure, and proceeding to studies of scribal variation spanning thousands of years, from Pharaonic to Late Antique and Islamic Egypt. This volume introduces to Egyptology concepts such as scribal communities, networks, and repertoires, and applies them to a variety of phenomena, including features of lexicon, grammar, orthography, palaeography, layout, and format.

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