Vorlesung und Hörsaal als Symptomwörter für Geschichte und Gegenwart der deutschen Sprache

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 556-595
Author(s):  
Wolf Peter Klein

Abstract The article starts with the etymology of the words Vorlesung („lecture“) and Hörsaal (“lecture hall”). On the one hand, it turns out that the two expressions are deeply anchored in the history of the old Latin scientific language. They transmit Latin structures and perspectives in German neologisms. On the other hand, the two words arose exactly at the time when the sciences were moving from Latin to German, thus distancing themselves from the traditional forms of Latin scholarship. In this light, they exemplify an epochal change in the history of the German language, but at the same time they represent a great European continuity. Against this background, the two words can be interpreted as symptomatic words associated with the Enlightenment’s confident outlook on the future relationship between science and society. Further corpus linguistic surveys also show how productively the two words appear in word formation processes. In particular, these surveys show by way of example that and how German standard language has benefited from the emergence of German academic language.

Author(s):  
S.G. Sheidayeva

Based on the material from the Russian commercial written records of the XVI-XVII centuries, this article examines semantic and derivational features of the vocabulary of the yamskoy [coachman’s] and izvoznyi [cabman’s] carrier’s trade. In terms of content, the words of these two professional spheres have much in common since the main occupation of yamshchiki [coachmen] and izvozchiki [cabmen] was transportation of people or goods by horse; here are used the names of characters, vehicles, travel modes, types of transported objects. The history of fixing of the words yamshchik [coachman] and izvozchik [cabman] in the Russian language reflects the universal pattern of changing the names of persons ending in -nik by the nouns ending in -shchik /chik ( yamnik - yamshchik [coachman], izvoznik - izvozchik [cabman]). At the same time, the categorical difference in the original names that were at the beginning of the word-formation chains caused a difference in the semantic development of the names of doers: in one case, this is a spatial nomination of yama [Russian word for a ‘pit’] denoting a "station on the road" (> yamchi, yamskoy > yamshchik [coachman]); in another one it is a designation of a movement in space izvoziti [Russian obsolete word for ‘to carry’] (> izvoz > izvozchik [cabman]). In this regard, the names of persons right from the beginning differed in their conceptual representations of the doers: yamshchik [coachman] is the one who moves along the road, and izvozchik [cabman] is the one who “carries” something both on land and on water (like a carrier). Different communicative spheres of yamskoy [coachman’s] (gonny [riding fast] ) and izvozny [cabman’s] carrier’s trade gave birth to specific names of transportation: gon’ba [fast ride] and izvoz [carriage], which had clear internal forms: the first one was motivated by the verb gonyati [Russian obsolete word for ‘to ride fast", and the second one - by the verb izvoziti [Russian obsolete word for ‘to carry outwards’] (cargo, goods).


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (6/2020(775)) ◽  
pp. 7-21
Author(s):  
Ewa Woźniak

The object of this paper is the extent and dynamics of language changes in the interwar period. The rebirth of Poland in 1918 and the resulting sociopolitical and cultural transformations caused major changes in the use of Polish as compared to the period of the Partitions. The process of language unifi cation, in particular on the phonetic plane, accelerated in the new conditions. The interwar period set the language development directions as regards word formation, namely expansion of acronyms, use of surnames as the derivation basis, and creation of hybrid structures with prefi xes and other elements of foreign provenance. The interwar period’s contribution to the evolution of the Polish language is internationalisation of vocabulary on the one hand and its Polonisation on the other hand. The ground-breaking nature of the period 1918–1939 is evidenced also by the multiplication of the lexical resource of the language. The unappreciated role the interwar period played in the evolution of Polish needs to be verifi ed and exposed in the periodisation of the history of language.


Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter

The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.


Author(s):  
Colby Dickinson

In his somewhat controversial book Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben makes brief reference to Theodor Adorno’s apparently contradictory remarks on perceptions of death post-Auschwitz, positions that Adorno had taken concerning Nazi genocidal actions that had seemed also to reflect something horribly errant in the history of thought itself. There was within such murderous acts, he had claimed, a particular degradation of death itself, a perpetration of our humanity bound in some way to affect our perception of reason itself. The contradictions regarding Auschwitz that Agamben senses to be latent within Adorno’s remarks involve the intuition ‘on the one hand, of having realized the unconditional triumph of death against life; on the other, of having degraded and debased death. Neither of these charges – perhaps like every charge, which is always a genuinely legal gesture – succeed in exhausting Auschwitz’s offense, in defining its case in point’ (RA 81). And this is the stance that Agamben wishes to hammer home quite emphatically vis-à-vis Adorno’s limitations, ones that, I would only add, seem to linger within Agamben’s own formulations in ways that he has still not come to reckon with entirely: ‘This oscillation’, he affirms, ‘betrays reason’s incapacity to identify the specific crime of Auschwitz with certainty’ (RA 81).


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu

The Paris avant-garde milieu from which both Cirque Calder/Calder's Circus and Painlevé’s early films emerged was a cultural intersection of art and the twentieth-century life sciences. In turning to the style of current scientific journals, the Paris surrealists can be understood as engaging the (life) sciences not simply as a provider of normative categories of materiality to be dismissed, but as a companion in apprehending the “reality” of a world beneath the surface just as real as the one visible to the naked eye. I will focus in this essay on two modernist practices in new media in the context of the history of the life sciences: Jean Painlevé’s (1902–1989) science films and Alexander Calder's (1898–1976) work in three-dimensional moving art and performance—the Circus. In analyzing Painlevé’s work, I discuss it as exemplary of a moment when life sciences and avant-garde technical methods and philosophies created each other rather than being classified as separate categories of epistemological work. In moving from Painlevé’s films to Alexander Calder's Circus, Painlevé’s cinematography remains at the forefront; I use his film of one of Calder's performances of the Circus, a collaboration the men had taken two decades to complete. Painlevé’s depiction allows us to see the elements of Calder's work that mark it as akin to Painlevé’s own interest in a modern experimental organicism as central to the so-called machine-age. Calder's work can be understood as similarly developing an avant-garde practice along the line between the bestiary of the natural historian and the bestiary of the modern life scientist.


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 86-99
Author(s):  
Vimbai Moreblessing Matiza

Dramatic and theatrical performances have a long history of being used as tools to enhance development in children and youth. In pre-colonial times there were some forms of drama and theatre used by different communities in the socialisation of children. It is in the same vein that this article, through the Intwasa koBulawayo performances, seeks to evaluate how drama and theatre are used to nurture children and youth into different developmental facets of their lives. The only difference which this article will take into cognisance is that the performances are done in a different environment, which is not the one used in the pre-colonial times. Although these performances were like this, the most important factor is the idea that children and youth are socialised through these performances. It is also against this backdrop that children and youth are growing up in a globalised environment, hence the performances should accommodate people from all walks of life and teach them relevant issues pertaining to life as they live it now. Thus the main task of the article is to spell out the role of drama and theatre in the nurturing of children and youth through socio economic and political development in Intwasa koBulawayo festivals.


Author(s):  
Mark Meagher

Responsive architecture, a design field that has arisen in recent decades at the intersection of architecture and computer science, invokes a material response to digital information and implies the capacity of the building to respond dynamically to changing stimuli. The question I will address in the paper is whether it is possible for the responsive components of architecture to become a poetically expressive part of the building, and if so why this result has so rarely been achieved in contemporary and recent built work. The history of attitudes to- ward obsolescence in buildings is investigated as one explanation for the rarity of examples like the one considered here that successfully overcomes the rapid obsolescence of responsive components and makes these elements an integral part of the work of architecture. In conclusion I identify strategies for the design of responsive components as poetically expressive elements of architecture.


2018 ◽  
pp. 1137-1148
Author(s):  
Dmitrii I. Petin ◽  

The article offers a source study of the letter of the head of the Financial Department at the Siberian Revolutionary Committee F. A. Zemit to the People's Commissar of Finance of the RSFSR N. N. Krestinsky. Its text analysis clears up the issue of creation of Soviet regional governing bodies in the financial–economical sphere in Siberia at the final stage of the Civil War. The published source allows to outline major impediment to restoration of the Soviet finance system in Siberia after the Civil War: shortage of financial workers, their low professional qualifications, lack of regulatory documentation for organizing activities, etc. Key methods used in the study are biographical and problematic/chronological. Biographical method allows to interpret the document and to link it with professional activities of F. A. Zemit in Omsk. The problematic/chronological method allows to trace the developments in regional finance and to understand their causes by placing them into historical framework. The letter was written by F. A. Zemit in early January 1920 – at a most difficult time in his career in Siberia. The author considers this ego-document unique and revealing in its way. On the one hand, it is an official appeal of an inferior financial manager to the head of the People's Commissariat of Finance; its content is practical and no-nonsense. On the other hand, its style indicates a warm friendly and trusting relationship between the sender and the addressee; F. A. Zemit was, apparently, able to report personally to the People's Commissar of Finance of the RSFSR on the difficult situation in the region and to do so with great frankness. This publication may be of interest to scholars in history of Russian finance, Russia Civil War, Soviet society, and Siberia of the period.


1995 ◽  
Vol 31 (8) ◽  
pp. 301-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Govert D. Geldof

In integrated water management, the issues are often complex by nature, they are capable of subjective interpretation, are difficult to express in standards and exhibit many uncertainties. For such issues, an equilibrium approach is not appropriate. A non-equilibrium approach has to be applied. This implies that the processes to which the integrated issue pertains, are regarded as “alive”’. Instead of applying a control system as the model for tackling the issue, a network is used as the model. In this network, several “agents”’ are involved in the modification, revision and rearrangement of structures. It is therefore an on-going renewal process (perpetual novelty). In the planning process for the development of a groundwater policy for the municipality of Amsterdam, a non-equilibrium approach was adopted. In order to do justice to the integrated character of groundwater management, an approach was taken, containing the following features: (1) working from global to detailed, (2) taking account of the history of the system, (3) giving attention to communication, (4) building flexibility into the establishing of standards, and (5) combining reason and emotions. A middle course was sought, between static, rigid but reliable on the one hand; dynamic, flexible but vague on the other hand.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric R. Scerri

<span>The very nature of chemistry presents us with a tension. A tension between the exhilaration of diversity of substances and forms on the one hand and the safety of fundamental unity on the other. Even just the recent history of chemistry has been al1 about this tension, from the debates about Prout's hypothesis as to whether there is a primary matter in the 19th century to the more recent speculations as to whether computers will enable us to virtually dispense with experimental chemistry.</span>


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