Languages of the Chinese of Java—An Historical Review

1984 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Rafferty
Keyword(s):  
Oral Language ◽  
Historical Review ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
National Language ◽  
Complete Disappearance ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Linguistic History ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Uses

The linguistic history of the Chinese of Java sketched here focuses on two periods of creative linguistic effort by the Chinese in the development of varieties of Malay/Indonesian. The first period is from 1880–1910, when the Peranakan Chinese—together with Dutch and Eurasians who were writing in Malay at the time—developed a literary language from Low Malay that was primarily an oral language with many regional and social variants. Soon after this period, the Dutch (and many Eurasians and some Chinese) abandoned Malay as a literary language in preference for Dutch. Only later, in the 1920s and 1930s, did Indonesian nationalists become interested in developing Malay as the national language. The second period of creative linguistic activity among the Peranakan Chinese is the period that followed Indonesian independence in 1945, which is characterized by the departure of the Dutch, the almost complete disappearance of the Dutch and Low Malay languages on Java, and the increased prominence of Javanese as the language of power and politics. During this period Peranakan of the Javanesespeaking areas of Java developed a Javanese-based mixed language (Indonesianized-Javanese) as their home language. The switch from a Malay-based to a Javanese-based language was not a radical change because the Peranakan community had been bilingual for many centuries, but it points out new social uses of languages already in their linguistic repertoire. This last period of linguistic creativity is significant because it is a break in the pattern of acceptance of another's language by the Chinese of Java, and it demonstrates their desire to create a distinctive dialect, a phenomenon reflecting the social reality of an unassimilated minority that has lived in the midst of the Javanese majority for centuries.

Perceptions of a New Era? Historical Writing in Early Ottoman Damascus

Arabica ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 419-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Astrid Meier
Keyword(s):  
Turning Point ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Comprehensive Understanding ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Social Uses ◽  
Source Of Information ◽  
Scholarly Attention

AbstractThe year 922/1516-7 is usually treated as an important turning point in the history of Bilād al-Šām. The Ottoman conquest initiated change in various fields which has been the focus of much scholarly attention. However, it is still difficult to understand in what ways the new Ottoman subjects perceived these changes, especially in terms of allegiance to the ruling dynasties. To trace the attitudes of different persons and groups, scholars have often turned to the rich body of contemporary historical writing and used it as a source of information. In this article, which is centred on Ottoman Damascus, I argue that chronicles and biographical collections themselves are important witnesses of change and worth to be studied in their own right. As a step towards a more comprehensive understanding of the social uses of knowledge, I suggest that we need to enquire further into the significance of melancholy and solitude in Ottoman historical writing.

Sprachwandel und Etymologie in Der Spanischen Sprachwissenschaft Des Siglo De Oro

1984 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 95-116
Author(s):  
Werner Bahner
Keyword(s):  
National Language ◽  
Siglo De Oro ◽  
Good Opportunity ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of Linguistics ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
First Time

Summary The Renaissance constitutes a new phase in the history of linguistics. The study of modern languages in particular contributed to enlarge the scope of philological concern as scholars try to promote and to codify a young national language. During this time philologists give particular attention to the origin of these vernaculars, distinguishing the different stages in their evolution and developing an especial awareness of chronology. For the representatives of a national philology, Latin is the starting point, the mould according to which the vernaculars are described and classified. Soon, however, more and more traits are recognized which are particular to these living languages, and which do not agree with the traditions of Latin grammar. On the one hand, modifications on the theoretical level are called for, and, on the other, there is a good opportunity to demonstrate the particularity of a given vernacular. All these tendencies can be found for the first time in the writings on Cas-tillian by the great philologist Antonio de Nebrija (1444–1522). Nebrija recognized a series of phonetic correspondences which, much later in the 19th century, are transformed into ‘phonetic laws’ by a rigorous methodology. In so doing the elaboration of orthographic principles had been for him a stimulus for his explications. In his “Diálogo de la lengua”, Juan de Valdés (devoted himself more extensively to the social aspects of Castillian, to linguistic changes, and to the historical causes for the distribution of Romance languages on the Iberian peninsula, stressing expecially the role of the ‘Reconquista’. The work of Bernardo José de Aldrete (1560–1641) offers a synthesis of all these efforts concerning the evolution of Castillian. He discusses all the substrata and superstrata of the language, sketches the different stages of development of his native tongue, examines Old Castillian with the help of medieval texts, and exploits what Nebrija had noted about the phonetic correspondences. In terms of scholarship, Aldrete’s work constitutes the culmination point in the movement engaged in supporting the rights of the Castillian language et in documenting its sovereignity vis-à-vis the Latin tradition.

Term and lexicographic standard

2019 ◽  
pp. 311-318
Author(s):  
Zinaida Kozyreva
Keyword(s):  
Structural Features ◽  
Negative Influence ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
National Language ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
New Words ◽  
Science Technology ◽  
The Social ◽  
A Chain

The article is devoted to the question of selecting a special (terminological) vocabulary for a comprehensive explanatory dictionary and its lexicographic normalization (standardization). Of particular relevance, this problem occurs today, when there is an active replenishment of the terminology in various fields of science, technology, production, etc. The language policy regarding the dynamic nature of the norms of the literary language consists in its codification – the establishment of rules of use in dictionaries and grammar. The main principle of graphic design of words in the dictionary of an interpretative type is the strict observance of the rules of the spelling. Independent standardization (bringing terminology to a single system) from the necessity of the first priority solving a number of problems caused by violations of the lexical general literary norm. The most typical spelling mistakes that occur in dictionaries are outlined, and the ways of overcoming them are proposed. The combination of objective updating of the lexical structure with the consciously carried on by linguists subjective updating has become a specific feature of work on organization, codification and development of the Ukrainian vocabulary. In a chain of terms on the notation of the notion “bringing something into a uniform” there is a certain hierarchical subordination: systematization – normalization – unification – codification – standardization “observance of the only stable grammatical and stylistic norms on the national language”. The question of the place of special vocabulary in general dictionaries is one of the most difficult in modern lexicography, especially today, when there is an active replenishment of the vocabulary by terms of various branches of science, technology, production. Theoretical lexicography substantiates the necessity of introducing terms into the register of explanatory dictionaries, which is the core of the terminology and at the same time a part of the literary language. Practical work on the dictionary reveals various tendencies in fixing the new words of the special vocabulary: from the aspiration of its full coverage to the reasoned selection. There are several main criteria for selecting terminological units for a general-purpose dictionary: 1) the social significance of the terms of science and technology; 2) structural features contributing to the term adaption by the system of literary language; 3) the scope of the special vocabulary. The stable tendency of productivity growth of syntactic derivation in the Ukrainian language is noted – replenishment of the terminological fund by terms of phrases, and also the criteria of the selection of such multi-component phrases, their codification and standardization are outlined. The main tendencies, which are traced in the new dictionaries, are noted. One of the most important is devoted to the foreign words entry into Ukrainian and problems connected with their spelling. Violations of spelling norms caused by wrong adaptation of borrowings in modern dictionaries are pointed out, and the negative influence of spelling mismanagement of borrowings on the functioning of the Ukrainian lexemes is emphasized. As a result, a well-considered way of building and normalizing the Ukrainian literary lexicon is the principle of a reasonable balance between tradition and the need for renewal.

Historical Poetics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Pryor
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Quantitative Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Social Uses

If poetics customarily deals with generalities, history seems to insist on particulars. In the 21st century, various literary critics have sought to manage these competing imperatives by developing an “historical poetics.” These critics pursue sometimes very different projects, working with diverse methodologies and theoretical frameworks, but they share a desire to think again about the relation between poetics and history. Some critics have pursued an historical poetics by conducting quantitative studies of changes in metrical form, while others have investigated the social uses to which poetry was put in the cultures of the past. Both approaches tend to reject received notions of the aesthetic or literary, with their emphasis on the individual poet and on the poem’s organic unity. Much work in historical poetics has focused instead on problems of genre and reception, seeking the historical significance of poetry in what is common and repeated. Sometimes this work has involved extensive archival research, examining memoirs, grammar books, philological tracts, and other materials in order to discover how poetry was conceived and interpreted at a particular time. These methods allow critics to tell histories of poetry and to reveal a history in poetry. The cultural history of poetic forms thus becomes a history of social thought and practice conducted through poetry. For other critics, however, the historical significance of a poem lies instead in the way it challenges the poetics of its time. This is to emphasize the singular over the common and repeated. In this mode, historical poetics aims both to restore poems to their proper historical moment and to show how poems work across history. The history to be valued in such cases is not a ground or world beyond the poem, but the event of the poem itself.

On the Possibility of Pidgin English Toponyms in Pacific Missions

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-151
Author(s):  
Joshua Nash
Keyword(s):  
Linguistic History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Norfolk Island ◽  
History Of ◽  
Available Information

Summary This paper speculates about the possible existence of Pidgin English toponyms on the Melanesian Mission on Norfolk Island. The argument considers why modern historians and linguists studying the social and linguistic history of the Melanesian Mission missionaries, and why missionaries from earlier periods, who were documenting and studying local Melanesian languages spoken within the Mission’s activities, did not provide possible available information on Pidgin English toponyms. This noted absence of an explicit focus on the toponymic lexicon of Pidgin English and other marginalised languages highlights certain metalinguistic and social priorities held by linguists.

scholarly journals L. E. Kalnyn’: foundations of her scholarship’s hypertext

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-36
Author(s):  
Pavlo Yu. Hrytsenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
National Language ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Structural Element ◽  
Functional Specificity ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

The works of renowned Slavicist Ludmila Kalnyn’ constitute an integral hypertext, exhibiting the movement of ideas, goals, and methods of studying Slavonic dialects in the second half of the 20th c. and the early 21st c. These works feature innovative methodologies and techniques of dialect research, such as her precise technique of modelling individual subdialects (i.e. actual communicative dialect systems) and dialect language (i.e. a construct comprising individual subdialects); this promising method has proved to be effective and has been adopted by other dialect researchers. Furthermore, she formulated a range of problems solution of which was aimed to the structure and functioning of dialects, their status in the national language stratigraphy, and areal characteristics of items and phenomena found in dialects. The scope of dialect modelling includes subdialect phonological systems, syllable-internal structure and syllabification, and word as both the field and the factor of phonetic changes. Her modelling technique involves the sequential use of sets of distinctive features of the objects under study, also taking into account the regularity of manifestation of features in dialect speech and conditions of their neutralization. Empirical databases were created regarding Slavonic (viz. Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Bulgarian and Sorbian) dialects, including their systemic descriptions. Special attention was given to the status of modern dialects against the background of other strata of the national language, and to their role in forming and present-day development of literary language. In her research, Kalnyn’ has demonstrated: – the advantage of the exhaustive systemic description of a dialect based on the system of distinctive features over descriptions of random subdialectal features against the background of standard language, the importance of uncontradictory explication of preconditions and chronotope of the origin of structural and functional specificity of modern Slavonic dialects; – the importance of joint approach combining synchronic systemic description with the elucidation of the history of every structural element and phenomenon, establishing their spread within national and general Slavonic continuum as a means of achieving the completeness of dialectal knowledge; – the heuristic value of identification and detailed analysis not only of entities and phenomena widely spread within a dialectal continuum, but also of locally limited ones of the ancient origin or, on the contrary, resulting from recent innovations; – the necessity for comprehensive dialectal studies of consistently considering social, historical, and cultural circumstances of a subdialect’s functioning within society. Many years of her active participation in the work on The General Slavonic Linguistic Atlas (including the identification and development of its theoretical foundations, production of numerous phonetic maps, especially interpretative and generalizing ones), analysis of phonetic Slavonic areas determined the dynamics of her views on many phenomena of Slavonic phonetics. At the same time, working in the international collective, and organizing international conferences dedicated to problems of Slavonic dialectology, led to the dissemination of L. E. Kalnyn’s ideas, theoretical generalizations, and practical experience. The trajectory of this experience’s emergence is insolubly linked with the conceptual development of present-day Slavonic dialectology.

Parrots, peccaries, and people

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 148-174
Author(s):  
Simon E. Overall
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Amazon Basin ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
Indigenous Group ◽  
Linguistic History ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Traits ◽  
Song Types

Abstract The western margin of the Amazon basin near the modern-day border between Ecuador and Peru is an area of notable linguistic and ethnic diversity, but the indigenous cultures also show considerable similarities, thanks to a long history of contact and mutual influence. One of the cultural traits of the area is a genre of “magic” songs used to ensure success in all kinds of activities, but especially romantic pursuits, hunting (for men), and gardening (for women). These songs are distinguished musically from other song types, the lyrics are rich in imagery and metaphor (especially relating to birds and animals) and allusions to mythology, and they use a lexicon that includes both archaisms and innovative loanwords from neighbouring languages. This paper focuses on the magic songs (called anɨn or anen) of the Aguaruna or Awajún, an indigenous group of north Peru. I describe the formal and poetic properties of these songs and their significance within the context of Aguaruna oral tradition and traditional culture, and then ask what these songs can tell us about the social and linguistic history of the region.

Public Screens and Urban Life

2013 ◽  
pp. 91-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Straw
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Urban Transportation ◽  
Transportation Systems ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Modernity ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Look ◽  
Social Uses

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This response to Sean Cubitt’s “Large Screens, Third Screens, Virtuality, and Innovation”looks at urban screens in relation to two key developments in the history of urban modernity. One of these is the expansion of electric lighting in cities from the nineteenth century onward.In what historians have called “nocturnalization,” cities have seen an expansion of the cultural and social uses of the urban night. Another development is the growth of urban transportation systems, wherein screens work both to distract travellers from the physical experience of travel and to offer forms of information, entertainment, or advertising. As media from newspapers to public screens books and digital tabloids have come to fill the social space of cities, they have engaged the look of viewer-citizens in a variety of novel and culturally significant ways.

Technological Beyond

2021 ◽  
pp. 64-81
Author(s):  
Enric Bas
Keyword(s):  
Social Evolution ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Time

In our condition as human beings, we have experienced a love-and-hate relationship with technology since the very beginning: from primitive humans (probably scared the very first time they saw fire) to 19th century Luddites to the recent conspiracy theories that link 5G to COVID-19, human beings have dreaded technology. But, for bad or for good, machines—which could be loosely defined from an etymological point of view as “structures of any kind created by humans”—have been, are, and probably will be an essential part in the history of mankind, thus playing a fundamental in the social evolution of human. This chapter attempts to shed some light and provide some insights into plausible conjectures by exploring future developments, either in the short and medium or in the long term, which might result from a synergistic context where exponentially-increasing technological innovation may lead to a radical change, an evolutionary paradigm shift in human life and civilization, by reaching toward a post-technological era characterized by consciousness of the noosphere.

Dal tempio monumentale alla baracca da fiera: mutamenti dello spazio urbano e luoghi teatrali a Madrid e Barcellona alla fine del secolo XIX

2009 ◽  
pp. 29-45
Author(s):  
Jeanne Moisand
Keyword(s):  
Social Changes ◽  
Cultural Goods ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
Suburban Areas ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Books ◽  
The City ◽  
Social Uses

- This article compares the construction of theaters in Madrid and Barcelona from the 1830's to the 1910's by looking at the various forms and types of theaters, as well as those who funded them. As the history of books has shown, we can gain a better understanding of the social uses of cultural goods by analyzing the material forms in which they are produced and distributed. In the two Spanish main capital cities, the architectural evolutions of theater buildings, social changes in the constructors' milieux, and the movement of theater sites out of the city centers to suburban areas, show how theater descended from an elitist form of culture to a mass consumption good, available to partly illiterate populations.

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