Wortbildung und Textsorte Verbalabstrakta in der spät(er)en Latinität

Summary:The paper deals with the derivational category of ‘action nouns’ both as a subject of general linguistics and as a problem of Indo-European morphology (primarily in the diachrony of Latin but also from the perspective of comparative philology). First of all, I elucidate the concepts used in the analysis of verbal abstracts – above all their well renowned definition by Walter Porzig as “Namen für Satzinhalte”. Subsequently, I interpret some passages occurring in comedies of Plautus and epigraphic documents of Old Latin illustrating the diachronic developments by accounting for some construction patterns under consideration of their ‘suprasyntactic’ aspects. In the paragraphs following, I discuss a variety of IE actional types (including the genesis of infinitives), also taking care of some significant relics of verbal constructions in Ancient Greek.The implication scale of increasing ‘concretization’, which I proposed and utilized in my studies so far, exhibits a development from action via the steps: result, instrument, location leading to (collective) agents. This thesis may also be corroborated by a number of Latin testimonies.According to my concept of correlation between frequency of nomina actionis and nomina acti on the one hand and the corresponding text type on the other, I present a number of examples taken from the authors Vitruvius, Frontinus, Petronius, Juvenalis, Justinus and Dares Phrygius. I describe and interpret them by means of qualitative criteria and quantitative parameters such as occurrence, semantic profile and competition in relation to alternative derivational types that employ cognate stems and affixes.

Strategies of Sound and Stringing in Ebenezer Pocock's West–East Verse

In an effort to capture how Orientalist translations, imitations and criticism of Asian poetry came to inform the idealization of lyric as a universal genre, this paper focuses on the practice of poetic metre in the nineteenth century. How did Victorian conceptions of recitational communities, bounded by shared ‘national’ metres, square against the wealth of translated works that were a major component of Victorian print culture? The amateur Orientalist Ebenezer Pocock explained various metres and musical practices associated with ‘Persian lyrics’ in his book Flowers of the East (1833) and offered equivalent metres in English before replicating these shared English/Persian metres in his own imitative poem ‘The Khanjgaruh: A Fragment’. This article sketches how Pocock's casting of this hybrid material in metres that would already have been recognizable to his English readers seems to have the intended effect of both orienting his work towards his domestic audience and grounding such a flexible approach within the Persian tradition itself. Pocock's poem sits amongst a range of accompanying materials including translations of Sa‘dī and scholarly essays on comparative philology and Persian literary history. Each of these different pieces supports the collection's greater effort – best encapsulated by ‘The Khanjgaruh’ – to both remember and imagine the shared poetic history between Asia and Europe. Pocock's writing thus emblemizes how the nineteenth-century ‘West–East lyric’ was a product of both historical and philological recovering as well as the willed creation of poets and poetry enthusiasts. As a category, lyric performs a binding function in Pocock's work to pull together a linguistically and professionally diverse community of writers.

Origins

This chapter explains how the history of comparative literature is a history of archives, such as of libraries and collections that are either preserved or lost and studied or forgotten. It mentions the first library that was established by the Tang Dynasty monk Xuanzang when he returned from his epochal journey to the western regions in order to collect Buddhist manuscripts. It also talks about the foundations of comparative literature that were established by the comparative philology that began in Renaissance Italy and spread to many parts of Enlightenment Europe. The chapter looks at Max Koch who wrote about comparative literary history and how it gained a sure footing with the inclusion of Oriental material. It also analyzes non-Eurocentric comparatism that draws on philological traditions from China and Japan to the Arab world.

William Frédéric Edwards and the study of human races in France, from the Restoration to the July Monarchy

Scholars of the nineteenth-century race sciences have tended to identify the period from c.1820– c.1850 as a phase of transition from philologically to physically focused study. In France, the physiologist William Frédéric Edwards (1776–1842) is normally placed near the center of this transformation. A reconsideration of Edwards’ oeuvre in the context of his larger biography shows that it is impossible to see a clear-cut philological to physical “paradigm shift.” Although he has been remembered almost solely for his principle of the permanency of physical “types,” Edwards was also committed to what he recognized as the new science of “ linguistique” and proposed a new branch of comparative philology based on pronunciation. Bearing Edwards’ attention to linguistics in mind, this article reconstructs his racial theories in their intellectual contexts and suggests that at a time of emergent disciplinary specialization, Edwards tried to hold discrete fields together and mold them into a new “natural history of man.”

A Nineteenth-Century Garment Throughout

Ogilvie discusses how the OED represents a key development in ‘modern’ lexicography based on how it was envisioned, compiled, and executed. The chapter provides background on the state of philology throughout the seventy-year process of compiling the OED, and documents the roles played by some of the primary figures who influenced and shaped the dictionary’s development. The central features characterizing the OED’s production, Ogilvie argues, were the editors’ application of historical principles to each entry; the favouring of descriptive over prescriptive methods; the attempt to provide thorough coverage of the English lexicon; and the use of collaborative compilation practices. Ogilvie also places the OED into the context of comparative philology and lexicography, and considers the intersection of nationalism, national identity, and the codification of the English language.

“Looking for the Zohar in the New Testament”: The Lost Messias puer of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth between Kabbalah and Biblical Studies

Christian Knorr von Rosenroth was the author of a work called Messias puer, which universally has been considered lost. This article seeks to demonstrate that a manuscript currently catalogued as Historiæ evangelicæ initium is, in fact, this lost work of Knorr. Knorr’s involvement in the study of the Jewish mystical tradition enabled him to develop new and original insights in his reading of the New Testament. Furthermore, his use of comparative philology points to him as a significant precursor in the development of biblical studies.

On the Diversity—and Productivity—of Language

Chapter 5 borrows Walter Benjamin’s description of the ‘narcotic historicism’ of nineteenth-century Paris (expressed in its arcades, panoramas, wax museums, and architecture) and applies it to comparative philology, suggesting that, in effect, it creates ‘museums’ of language. In this perspective, some forms of twentieth-century modernism appear as attempts to liberate the force bound up in historicist forms; Saussure, Bakhtin, and Benjamin unleash the productivity and creativity of language that had been explained (and confined) in the phonetic laws discovered in the previous century. Bakhtin does so by counterpoising heteroglossia with myth; Saussure does so by invoking a model of linguistic change modelled on urban life and the republican social contract; Benjamin does so in his theory of translation, which aims to recover a native linguistic energy from the diversity of actual languages. In their different ways, these paeans to linguistic productivity draw attention to another feature of mass democracy: its urban character.