Languages and Linguistics
Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics Online
The most comprehensive reference work on Slavic languages ever published. It provides authoritative treatment of all important aspects of the Slavic language family from its Indo-European origins to the present day, as well as consideration of the interaction of Slavic with other languages.
Highlights
News & Announcements
Stay up-to-date with the Brill Community and sign up to our newsletter!
Sign upInterview with Marc L. Greenberg on the Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics
In June 2020, Brill released the online Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics (ESLL). Read an interview with Editor-in-Chief, Marc L. Greenberg (University of Kansas).
New at Brill: Heritage Language Journal
The Heritage Language Journal (HLJ) was established in 2002 by the National Heritage Language Resource Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. Its aim is to provide a forum for scholars to disseminate research and knowledge about heritage and community languages.
Major Open Access Collaboration between Brill and ERC Project ‘Open Philology: The Composition of Buddhist Scriptures’
Brill is delighted to announce a new Open Access collaboration with ‘Open Philology: The Composition of Buddhist Scriptures’ (OpenPhilology), funded by the European Research Council. The resulting book series Buddhist Open Philology Project will publish translations of scriptures, text editions, and studies on the select corpus of Mahāyāna Buddhist scriptures (sūtra), the Mahāratnakūṭa collection of 49 sūtras. All volumes in the series will be published in Open Access with Brill.
Acquisitions Editors
Brill
Seçil Ümitvar
Uri Tadmor
Böhlau
Pascale Mannert
Sarah Stoffaneller
V&R unipress
Marie-Carolin Vondracek
Languages and Linguistics
Acrostics constitute an interesting technique usually employed in verse language but also in prose, whereby the first letters (sometimes the initial syllable or even an entire word) in each line or word form a word or phrase, a name or even a message that the composer wishes to hide or reveal skillfully. Acrostics form part of language play but also a mechanism in the artistic usages of the language. Normally, they are employed in gnomes, riddles, and other such didactic compositions, in hymnal poetry, both biblical and post-biblical (particularly frequent in the Middle Ages), but also in secular praise poetry, love songs, inscriptions, or are exploited as rhetorical figures. In addition to their artistic effect, acrostics may also aim at entertaining through the skillful manipulation of expressive material in ways that amuse the readers or listeners by creating aural or visual images of rare esthetic beauty. In this sense, acrostics may also serve as techniques of cryptography and steganography, having an anagrammatic and symbolic function by encrypting messages, names, and other such things.
This entry discusses the concept of actionality (otherwise known as Aktionsart or lexical aspect), outlining some of the major theoretical approaches, and the way in which these have been applied to Ancient Greek. Particular attention is paid to the way in which actionality as a category is dependent from and interacts with other linguistic categories.
This entry deals with the major changes that the case system of Greek underwent throughout its diachrony. Despite the synthetic nature of the Ancient Greek case system, the first signs of the tendency to reinforce the semantic functions of the oblique cases with adpositions can already be found in Classical Greek. The shift from synthetic to analytic structures was a long process that continued to evolve from Hellenistic Greek into the modern dialects to different degrees and with various constructions. More specifically, as the ancient genitive and dative originated from mergers between the inherited Proto-Indo-European cases (Anc.Gk. genitive < PIE genitive + ablative; Anc.Gk. dative < PIE dative + instrumental + locative), the disambiguation of their polysemy was raised through the use of (mostly) spatial adpositions that eventually resulted in the loss of the ablative and partitive meanings of the genitive and the complete loss of the dative in Medieval Greek.
Animacy is an ontological category or semantic feature based on which nouns and their referents are classified as human or non-human, and as animate or inanimate. In Greek, gender assignment, gender agreement, and nominal inflection are the main grammatical domains in which animacy effects are found. Throughout Greek, the overwhelming majority of nouns that are assigned to the neuter gender denote inanimate entities. In Anc.Gk., it was not uncommon for agreement targets controlled by neuter nouns denoting humans to appear in the masculine or feminine gender, and for targets controlled by masculine and feminine nouns denoting inanimate entities to appear in the neuter. In Pontic Greek, inanimate masculine and feminine nouns trigger semantic agreement on almost all agreement targets. There is also a diachronic tendency for inanimate masculine and feminine nouns to develop forms belonging to the /i(n)/ neuter inflectional class.
Byzantine grammatical scholarship is mostly indebted to the Alexandrian tradition, especially the Techne of Dionysios Thrax, whereas Stoic and other older kinds of linguistic thought are mostly unknown. The Byzantine output includes general treatises and word-by-word commentaries on individual texts, with explanations of orthography, prosody, morphology, etymology and semantics. Furthermore, there are school exercises (schedographiae) and lexica with grammatical information. In most cases it is clear that the Byzantine grammarians have normative and pedagogical rather than scholarly and descriptive ambitions. Among the more important Byzantine grammarians are Michael Synkellos (760/761–846), representing the first generation of those preserved, and Maximos Planoudes (ca. 1260–1305). Planoudes exhibits signs of scientific ambition and is probably to be seen as a harbinger of a new era, where modern Latin linguistic thought is assimilated by Greeks. Finally, from the late 14th c. Greek scholars move to Italy and start to teach there. This leads to a new focus on grammar, for the fact that it is now often taught to foreigners, and it further strengthens the interdependence of Greek and Latin linguistics.
The phenomenon of shifts a word might undergo with respect to its lexical and/or syntactic category is discussed. After a careful sorting out of the definitions of relevant terminology, different kinds of category shift are illustrated with data primarily from Modern Greek.
This entry outlines causal clauses, focusing in particular on Ancient Greek. After a brief introduction to the notion of ‘causality’, it surveys the different types of causal expressions that are attested, and discusses the factors that may motivate the choice for one rather than the other expression. The last part of the entry gives an overview of some diachronic tendencies that can be found, and discusses the (lack of) continuity between Ancient and Modern Greek.
Throughout the history of Greek, the cohortative modality has been expressed by means of the subjunctive mood, often together with a preceding imperative or a hortatory particle. During Late Antiquity one such imperative gave rise to the Μedieval Greek marker ας as ‘let’s’, which, when combined with 1st person plural verbs, has been the main device for expressing speaker-inclusive exhortation up until today.
The contribution is intended as a presentation of the category of conjuncts, i.e., adverbial devices of discourse linkage, in the history of Greek. In the course of time, the loosely demarcated group of Anc.Gk. conjuncts, gave its place to a more distinct category of connectives which commonly occupy the second place in sentential structure and comprises members which have evolved to dummy discourse devised in Mod.Gk, while some of them have lost any bond to their original adverbiality.
The terminology of death varies in terms of register, i.e. literary and ‘official’ terms and ‘substandard’, colloquial and jargon terms, and in that there are terms that speak directly for death and dying, but as death is the prime taboo, talk about it is conducted mostly with metaphorical language. The colloquial terms seem to thrive with the formation of a large and varied range of expressions of death, often not of ‘panhellenic’ use but confined in place, genre, author or type of text. In any case, the resulting language of death is characterized by a profusion of expressive means.