Strange Vernaculars

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Sorensen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Literature ◽  
English Language ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
British History ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Common People ◽  
National Community ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

While eighteenth-century efforts to standardize the English language have long been studied, less well-known are the era's popular collections of odd slang, criminal argots, provincial dialects, and nautical jargon. This book delves into how these published works presented the supposed lexicons of the “common people” and traces the ways that these languages, once shunned and associated with outsiders, became objects of fascination in printed glossaries, and in novels, poems, and songs. The book argues that the recognition and recovery of outsider languages was part of a transition in the eighteenth century from an aristocratic, exclusive body politic to a British national community based on the rhetoric of inclusion and liberty, as well as the revaluing of a common British past. These representations of the vernacular made room for the “common people” within national culture, but only after representing their language as “strange.” Such strange and estranged languages, even or especially in their obscurity, came to be claimed as British, making for complex imaginings of the nation and those who composed it. Odd cant languages, witty slang phrases, provincial terms newly valued for their connection to British history, or nautical jargon repurposed for sentimental connections all toggle, in eighteenth-century jest books, novels, and poems, between the alluringly alien and familiarly British. Shedding new light on the history of the English language, the book explores how eighteenth-century British literature transformed the patois attributed to those on the margins into living symbols of the nation.

The Constitutional Theories of Thomas Paine

1946 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
John J. Meng
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Common People ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Great Ability ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The Common

The latter half of the eighteenth century was a period of tremendous social, political, and economic fermentation. Much of our contemporary civilization was shaped by the forces released during those five decades. Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Germans of great ability and deserved renown had written and were writing of the rights of man and of the citizen. More than ever before in the history of the modern world thought was being given to the lot of the common people. In America, and later in France, Thomas Paine epitomized this liberal intellectual trend in words that have been adopted as classic expressions of the inherent value of the human personality.Unfortunately, the phenomenal growth of industrial capitalism during he nineteenth and twentieth centuries caused the new bourgeois ruling classes to lose sight of the basic human values stressed so emphatically by the eighteenth-century intellectuals.

scholarly journals Shifting characterizations of the ‘Common People’ in modern English retranslations of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War: a corpus-based analysis

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Jones
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Peloponnesian War ◽  
Common People ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Little research has yet explored the impact of (re)translation on narrative characterization, that is, on the process through which the various actors depicted in a narrative are attributed particular traits and qualities. Moreover, the few studies that have been published on this topic are either rather more anecdotal than systematic, or their focus is primarily on the losses in character information that inevitably occur when a narrative is retold for a new audience in a new linguistic context. They do not explore how the translator’s own background knowledge and ideological beliefs might affect the characterization process for readers of their target-language text. Consequently, this paper seeks to make two contributions to the field: first, it presents a corpus-based methodology developed as part of the Genealogies of Knowledge project for the comparative analysis of characterization patterns in multiple retranslations of a single source text. Such an approach is valuable, it is argued, because it can enhance our ability to engage in a more systematic manner with the accumulation of characterization cues spread throughout a narrative. Second, the paper seeks to move discussions of the effects of translation on narrative characterization away from a paradigm of loss, deficiency and failure, promoting instead a perspective which embraces the productive role translators often play in reconfiguring the countless narratives through which we come to know, imagine and make sense of the past, our present and imagined futures. The potential of this methodology and theoretical standpoint is illustrated through a case study exploring changes in the characterization of ‘the common people’ in two English-language versions of classical Greek historian Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, the first produced by Samuel Bloomfield in 1829 and the second by Steven Lattimore in 1998. Particular attention is paid to the referring expressions used by each translator—such as the multitude vs. the common people—as well as the specific attributes assigned to this narrative actor. In this way, the study attempts to gain deeper insight into the ways in which these translations reflect important shifts in attitudes within key political debates concerning the benefits and dangers of democracy.

From Hard-Copy to Digital Law via “Illustrated Courtrooms”: Visualising the History of Legal English

Pólemos ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Nicolini
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Hard Copy ◽  
Legal Language ◽  
History Of ◽  
Judicial Proceedings ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
The Law ◽  
Digital Law

Abstract This essay addresses different patterns of the visualisation of the law. It examines how scholars attempt to depict, represent, and perform the law and its founding authority. It also focuses on the pragmatics of legal language: written and spoken standard legal English are pragmatically enriched within contexts where the law is interpreted, uttered, or performed. The linguistic notion of “context” discloses the interrelations between the agendas of law and power and reveals how the law conveys its content to the body politic as its ultimate addressee. It then proposes a renewed concept of legal linguistics. In order to determine the different ideologies underpinning the evolution of English legal language, as well as its prototypical forms of the visualisation of the law, three stages in the history of the English language will be examined: Late Middle English, Early Modern English, and Contemporary English. Each of these stages will be likened to the different parts of judicial proceedings. This will allow us to examine how English legal language has been used in a specific context, the trial, where the law is both uttered and performed.

scholarly journals Fra eneveldets scene mot representative forsamlinger: visitasen som offentlig arena i Norge, ca. 1750–1850

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 183-211
Author(s):  
Trond Bjerkås
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Public Participation ◽  
General Public ◽  
Common People ◽  
Lay Members ◽  
The Common ◽  
Control Apparatus ◽  
The Church

From the Stage of State Power to Representative Assembly?: The Visitation as a Public Arena, 1750–1850In the eighteenth century, the bishops’ visitations to dioceses constituted an important part of the control apparatus of the Church and the absolutist state. The article examines visitations in Norway in terms of public arenas, where the common people interacted with Church officials. During the period 1750 to 1850, the visitations were gradually transformed from arenas in which the state manifested its power towards a largely undifferentiated populace, to meeting places that resembled representative assemblies with both clerical and common lay members. Thus, it adapted to new forms of public participation established by the reforms of national and local government in the first half of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the process amounted to an elitization, because a few representatives replaced of the congregation as a whole. It is also argued that parish churches in the eighteenth century functioned as general public forums with a number of other functions in addition to worship, such as being places of trade and festivities. This seems to change in the nineteenth century, when churches became more exclusively religious arenas. The transition can be seen in the context of new forms of participation in Church matters. Many clerics wanted greater participation by sections of the commoners, in order to strengthen control in moral and religious matters.

The Birth of Democracy

1957 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-61
Author(s):  
Christopher Dawson
Keyword(s):  
Modern World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Market Place ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Common People ◽  
Considerable Difficulty ◽  
Democratic Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Revolution

The origins of modern democracy are so closely bound up with the history of liberalism that it is a matter of considerable difficulty to disentangle them and to distinguish their distinctive contributions to the common political tradition of modern Western culture. For this question also involves that of the relation between the three revolutions, the English, the American, and the French, which transformed the Europe of the ancien régime, with its absolute monarchies and state churches, into the modern world. Now all these three revolutions were liberal revolutions and all of them were political expressions of the movement of the European enlightenment in its successive phases. But this movement was not originally a democratic one and it was only in the second half of the eighteenth century that the democratic ideal was clearly formulated. On the continent of Europe the revolution of ideas preceded the political and economic revolutions by half a century, and the revolution of ideas was not in any sense of the word a democratic movement; it was the work of a small minority of men of letters who looked to the nobles and the princes of Europe rather than to the common people, and whose ideal of government was a benevolent and enlightened absolutism, like that of Frederick the Great or the Empress Catherine of Russia. There was an immense gulf between the ideas of Voltaire and Turgot, of Diderot and D'Alembert, and the opinions of the average man. The liberalism of the philosophers was a hothouse growth which could not be easily acclimatized to the open air of the fields and the market place.

Contract

2019 ◽  
pp. 369-385
Author(s):  
John Baker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Standard Form ◽  
Contract Law ◽  
Third Party ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Privity Of Contract

This chapter explores some lines of development in contract law after 1600. First there were questions flowing from the decision in Slade’s Case – the pleading formulae known as the ‘common counts’ in indebitatus assumpsit were quickly settled and the perjury problems after the disuse of wager of law were dealt with in the Statute of Frauds 1677. Attempts to rationalize consideration in the eighteenth century were unsuccessful save that it became distinct from the requirement of an intention to be bound. The chapter traces the history of privity of contract and of the various attempts to give remedies to third-party beneficiaries. It then discusses the implication of terms into contracts, the difference between conditions and warranties, exclusion clauses, and the problems occasioned by standard-form contracts.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
S. Elizabeth Penry
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Common People ◽  
New Towns ◽  
The Common ◽  
Planned Towns ◽  
The Town ◽  
Over Time

In the sixteenth century, Spaniards forcibly resettled Andeans into planned towns called reducciones. Andeans adapted the political and religious institutions of the new towns, the cabildo (town council) and the cofradías (confraternities), and made them their own, organizing them by the Andean social form, the ayllu. Over time, political legitimacy and authority within towns was transferred from traditional native hereditary lords, the caciques, to the common people of the town, who called themselves the común. Although a Spanish word, común took on Andean meaning as it was the word used to translate terms for collective land and the collective people of a town. It became a recognized shorthand for a political philosophy empowering common people. In the late eighteenth-century era of Atlantic Revolutions, the común rose up against its caciques, in an Enlightenment-from-below moment of popular sovereignty.

Bearing Witness

2018 ◽  
pp. 184-217
Author(s):  
Santana Khanikar
Keyword(s):  
State Of Exception ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
Common People ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
Indian State ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

This chapter discusses conflict and violence in Lakhipathar, over a period of two decades, drawing on oral histories from the people of Lakhipathar. Listening to the narratives of past sufferings here has worked not merely a tool to know what happened to the narrators in the past but it also gives a key to analyse why and how they live in the present. Apart from offering evidence towards the larger argument of the work, this part of the book has also aimed towards opening a conversation on some buried and forgotten moments in the history of the Indian state that resemble what could be called an Agambenian ‘state of exception’. The dense narratives give a picture of the collaboration and deceit, revenge and violence, suspicion and fear in war-torn Lakhipathar and how the common people negotiated their ways through these.

Francisco de Combés’s History of Mindanao and Jolo (1667)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez
Keyword(s):  
Religious Life ◽  
Common People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

In this excerpt from his history of the southern Philippines and of the efforts of the Jesuits to convert its inhabitants, Francisco de Combés (1620–1665) paints a sensationalist image of the religious life of Mindanao, emphasizing the supposed atheism of the common people and the practice of sorcery by their Muslim rulers. The heroic Jesuits operating out of the Spanish settlement of Zamboanga struggle with the volatile politics of the Islamicate south in their heroic efforts to bring Christianity to people that they misrecognize as “moors.” Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez places the text in the context of Spain’s troubled relationship with Mindanao.

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