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.
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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.
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Böhlau
Pascale Mannert
Sarah Stoffaneller
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Languages and Linguistics
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 term Koine is generally used as a label for designating the low variety of written Med.Gk., in opposition to classicizing or atticizing Greek, i.e. Koine means a less literary and less elaborated written variety. Since the term is applied to a broad spectrum of different registers, the subdivisions ‘literary’ and ‘popular Koine’ are also in use. By and large, Koine corresponds with ‘middle’ and ‘low style’, whereas classicizing Greek with ‘high style’. In contrast to Anc.Gk. where Koine refers also to (varieties of) the spoken language, for Byzantine Greek a third term is traditionally used, ‘vernacular’ which applies to the spoken language and even more so to the literary language based in its morphology on the spoken language (hence ‘Vernacular literature’, appearing from the 12th/13th c. on). The Koine variety is distinct from both the classicizing language and the vernacular; on a scale with two opposite ends (atticizing and spoken Greek), Koine is located in the middle. Accordingly, Koine can be defined as the written variety that avoids both distinctively atticizing (and in poetry, homerizing) as well as distinctively vernacular elements, in particular regarding morphology.
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 discusses the concept of ‘linguistic complexity’: we start by briefly outlining the main theoretical approaches and the different linguistic levels to which complexity has been related. We then go into the ways in which complexity has been operationalized in historical sociolinguistic research, and end the entry by focusing on complexity and complexity loss in historical stages of the Greek language.
This entry shows that the concept of news that we have today is not a modern invention but rather a social and cultural institution that has been passed down to us by the Greeks as a legacy. In order to understand what was considered news in Ancient Greece, we conducted a lexical study of ἄγγελος ángelos – the word used to denote the messenger in charge of transmitting news – and all of its derivatives attested in an extensive corpus.
The language of contracts and ledgers is a mixed register used in a variety of text genres, while it includes, to a different degree, various legal, financial, technical and general language elements. The Modern Greek language of contracts and ledgers is formulaic and includes numerous learned and archaic morphological, phonological and syntactic features, semantic peculiarities and set phrases, while the language of ledgers is elliptic as well, as it abounds in abbreviations and normally lacks verbal constructions. The language of contracts and ledgers tends to avoid loanwords, although specific genres, such as leasing and banking contracts, which are influenced by Anglo-Saxon traditions, contain many loanwords and loan abbreviations.
Contrastive Grammar deals with the synchronic analysis of similarities and differences among (usually) two or three languages. It is a sub-field of the general field of comparing languages, and its origin can be found in Foreign Language Teaching, although nowadays it is a borderline sub-field between Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. Three cases are presented here: a) a morphological contrastive analysis of compounding in German and Greek, b) a syntactic contrastive analysis of information structure in Modern Greek, English and German and c) a semantic contrastive analysis of the French markers encore and même and their equivalents in Modern Greek.
Greek employs a large host of means and mechanisms in carrying out emphasis which can be categorized into lexical, morphological, phonetic and phonological, syntactic, stylistic, and pragmatic, or combinations thereof. In writing, emphasis is in certain occasions signaled with the use of special graphemes (e.g. capitals, calligraphic or bold-faced characters, use of italics, underlining, etc.) or even by punctuation. Such means and mechanisms establish prominence relations between linguistic units and play an important role in the semantic and pragmatic interpretation in language use.
This entry discusses the status and the distribution of empty categories in Greek. Three types of empty categories are presented: (a) Null subjects: finite clauses involve a null-subject pro identified by the rich subject-agreement on the verb, whereas non-finite clauses in older stages of the language involve either a caseless PRO or a trace/copy in control or raising constructions or an accusative case marked pro. (b) Null objects: Mod.Gk. displays two types of object drop in which the null object is interpreted as a generic cognate object in the first construction and as an indefinite deleted element in the second one. Definite null objects are additionally attested in Anc.Gk. (c) Null articles: Depending on the analysis, the existence of a null-article can be postulated in bare-NP constructions in all historical periods of Greek.
The opposition Greeks vs barbarians is a term which initially referred exclusively to Greek vs. non-Greek-speaking: From the neutral connotation of this word from Homer to the Hellenistic age, barbaros was associated with several and further meanings, such as stranger, foreigner, Persian, cultureless savage, uneducated/dumb, etc. One can observe the tendency towards a purely cultural perception of diversity, which could entirely exclude the linguistic reference, especially since Greek speakers themselves could also be called barbaroi. On the other hand, the self-perception of the Greeks as ‘Greek’ dates from the time of the city states, as witnessed in Herodotus’ famous statement about common descent (ὅμαιμον), language (ὁμόγλωσσον), religion and customs (ἤθεα ὁμότροπα; Herodotus 8.144.2–3). This of course was a later ‘external’ reflection on commonalities that were real but had to be explicitly expressed, since this kind of self-perception and sense of ethnic belonging had to be constructed first. From today’s perspective, the polarity between the Ionian and Doric tribes corresponded more to a polarity between different ethnic groups. Although the Greek tribes had shared ethnic bonds (e.g. language, ancestry, religion, customs), these commonalities were not necessarily perceived as such; they only developed via a historical process.