Archives for “Linguistics”
Ok, I’ll give this a try, although I didn’t get any bites with my last attempt at soliciting information from the learned…
I need to find the best references for textual variants in the Gospels. I’m not as much interested in the critically identified “best readings” of the text themselves, but good apparati that show the variants. Right now I’m finding that Aland’s invaluable Synopsis Quattuor Evangeliorum has a cracking good apparatus, but I need at least one more good source to try to fill in gaps. My goal is to identify variations between the Vorlage and each of the early translations I’ll be working with, so while I don’t have time to become a textual critic, I do have to avail myself of the best available critical work in order to get an idea of what each translation’s Vorlage might have looked like so that I’ll be able to distinguish a stylistic/synctactically significant divergent rendering from a calque of an obscure MS variant.
- Dialectology and the Gospels Since starting my research of the Gospels for my dissertation, I have repeatedly wondered (as I idly mused earlier) if there have been any attempts to identify where the Gospels...
- The Truth Project and critical thinking The most dangerous shyster is the one who has convinced himself to believe his own pitch. Over at The Creation of an Evolutionist, Mike is continuing to blog through his...
- Meandering through the Synoptics Ok, I promised to write stuff I find interesting as I go through my diss research, so here’s a couple thoughts I had tonight as I was researching. These will...
Since starting my research of the Gospels for my dissertation, I have repeatedly wondered (as I idly mused earlier) if there have been any attempts to identify where the Gospels may have originated/developed based upon dialectal considerations. As I run across patterns such as Matthew’s preference for plural nouns and lexical issues such as synonym substitution that by all appearances don’t significantly influence thematic or other conscious stylistic differences, I automatically think dialect, although of course idiolect variation occurs within a single dialect. This is contingent, of course, on being able to identify the place of origin for other texts with which they may be compared, so I recognize it’s a tall order. I assume there are plenty of guesses about where certain Gospels (John, for instance) originated based upon other considerations.
Related posts:- Help wanted: critical editions of the Gospels Ok, I’ll give this a try, although I didn’t get any bites with my last attempt at soliciting information from the learned… I need to find the best references for...
- Meandering through the Synoptics Ok, I promised to write stuff I find interesting as I go through my diss research, so here’s a couple thoughts I had tonight as I was researching. These will...
- Editorial fatigue : author :: progressive latitude : translator The so-called Synoptic Problem in biblical studies results from the search for an explanation of the similarities in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) that even in a cursory...
Ok, I promised to write stuff I find interesting as I go through my diss research, so here’s a couple thoughts I had tonight as I was researching. These will doubtless seem somewhat stream-of-consciousness, so I apologize in advance for any seasickness that results from an attempt on your part to read through the meandering thoughts of this Synoptic explorer.
(Please bear in mind that although I had a good class on the Synoptics over ten years ago, I’m not really conversant in the literature. My subject is primarily linguistic and related to early translations of the Synoptics from Greek, so I’m having to approach these biblical studies questions as a rank amateur.)
It strikes me once again that explaining the parallels between the Synoptics isn’t as difficult as explaining the differences. These are so perplexing because it appears at times that whole swaths of shared material are meticulously reworded so as not to be verbatim; tenses in verbs, number in nouns, virtually interchangeable lexical items, etc. are switched seemingly to avoid being word-for-word the same. Yet these will frequently occur amid whole phrases and sentences that are virtually identical between two or more of the Gospels, above and beyond the obvious identity of the general narrative enclosing them. The question arises, why is there this fluctuation between trivial differences in wording that don’t seem to play into authorial thematic emphases and entire sentences showing verbatim agreement?
Related posts:- Editorial fatigue : author :: progressive latitude : translator The so-called Synoptic Problem in biblical studies results from the search for an explanation of the similarities in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) that even in a cursory...
- Dialectology and the Gospels Since starting my research of the Gospels for my dissertation, I have repeatedly wondered (as I idly mused earlier) if there have been any attempts to identify where the Gospels...
- Help wanted: critical editions of the Gospels Ok, I’ll give this a try, although I didn’t get any bites with my last attempt at soliciting information from the learned… I need to find the best references for...
A recent study in Nature News that I just read about is of interest to my field of graduate study, Indo-European linguistics. Of special interest to me, it ties in historical linguistics, the theory of evolution, and the nature of scientific inquiry in an interesting way.
Historical linguists have long supposed a link between most of the languages of Europe and India’s Sanskrit, an ancient forerunner of modern Hindi and a few other Indian languages. This link is now universally accepted to be common descent: they all shared a proto-language, spoken by a single population before splitting up and “evolving” into many of today’s languages.
The “common ancestor” of this family of languages is referred to as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). As with biological evolution, we can reconstruct its path and make suppositions about interrelationships based upon shared similarities and/or differences. Our suppositions cannot be confirmed: no one’s going to find a cassette recording or a written document in PIE, so our reconstructions will never be confirmed that way, although various stages before that proto-form have been captured and fleshed out our understanding better. Similarly, evolution, while corroborated by ancient evidence all the time, never stands a chance of finding a fossil of the first single-celled life. A fossil or a document of more “transitional forms” would be nice, but they’re not necessary to make a reasonable extrapolation that the ones we have found share ancestry.
Related posts:- Mysteries of my field of study revealed: the Indo-Europeans Germanic and Indo-European studies. What the heck is that? Well, let me start with a summary of the anthropological side of the discipline. Once upon a time, in an area...
- Genetic map of Europe Click to enlarge The New York Times has published an article on the results of a genetic study that sought to show the genetic interrelationships of the peoples of...
- Mysteries of my field of study revealed: the Birth of Historical Linguistics Earlier I made mention of the consistency of sound changes, what the nineteenth-century German grammarians called the Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze (the “exceptionlessness of sound change”) . The catalyst for this...
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The New York Times has published an article on the results of a genetic study that sought to show the genetic interrelationships of the peoples of Europe. This is fascinating to me as an Indo-European linguist and someone interested in the early history of Europe. Looking at the map provided in the article, I see that the Europeans as grouped according to their genetic heritage correlate strikingly with the reconstructed language families and with the conclusions of archaeology – or should I say “intelligent historical linguistics” and “intelligent archaeology”? (Sorry, couldn’t resist a dig. Or the bad pun!)
Naturally, the speakers of Germanic languages are closely related. It is also not surprising that the Celtic peoples in Ireland have overall interbred with the Germanic peoples who have displaced them, but it is quite interesting that they share such a close relationship with the continental people of the Netherlands and that both these are tangential to France, whose old name Gaul is related to “Gaelic” because of its ancient Celtic population. The Celtic languages are almost extinct, but as they were assimilated rather than wiped out, their genetic inheritance is still noticeable enough to detect relationships between those who remained on the continent and those who broke off and populated the British Isles.
Related posts:- Mysteries of my field of study revealed: the Indo-Europeans Germanic and Indo-European studies. What the heck is that? Well, let me start with a summary of the anthropological side of the discipline. Once upon a time, in an area...
- Genetics and linguistics play well together A recent study in Nature News that I just read about is of interest to my field of graduate study, Indo-European linguistics. Of special interest to me, it ties in...
- Mysteries of my field of study revealed: the Birth of Historical Linguistics Earlier I made mention of the consistency of sound changes, what the nineteenth-century German grammarians called the Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze (the “exceptionlessness of sound change”) . The catalyst for this...
Earlier I made mention of the consistency of sound changes, what the nineteenth-century German grammarians called the Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze (the “exceptionlessness of sound change”) . The catalyst for this belief, which was in turn the catalyst for the existence of the discipline of historical linguistics, was the product of the work of two men, the first of whom was a German named Jakob Grimm (one of the Brothers Grimm who compiled the German folktales) in 1820.
Grimm, like others, recognized that the Germanic languages (among which are German, Dutch, Gothic, the Scandinavian languages, and English) share a common ancestor with Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, based on a large number of vocabulary words whose phonetic similarities are too similar to be coincidental. Grimm’s important insight was that, in almost every word that appears to be related among Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and the Germanic languages, words that had the consonants p, t, or k in the non-Germanic languages showed up in Germanic with the consonants f, þ (the “th” in think) or χ (as in German Bach) instead. He also noted that Gk/Lat/Skt b, d, g generally corresponded with Gmc p, t, k. The Gk, Lat, and Skt consonants that we now know come from Indo-European *bh, *dh, *gh he saw as corresponding with Gmc b, d, g (simplified here from a close phonetic variant). All three correspondences make up what we now call Grimm’s Law: in other words, he saw a method to the madness and was able to accurately predict the sorts of sounds that made Germanic the odd man out where Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit agreed with one another. Here’s an example.
Related posts:- Mysteries of my field of study revealed: the Tools of the Trade My last post dealt with the anthropological side of my discipline. Most of what we know about the history of the Indo-European people groups comes not from historical records per...
- Mysteries of my field of study revealed: the Indo-Europeans Germanic and Indo-European studies. What the heck is that? Well, let me start with a summary of the anthropological side of the discipline. Once upon a time, in an area...
- Genetics and linguistics play well together A recent study in Nature News that I just read about is of interest to my field of graduate study, Indo-European linguistics. Of special interest to me, it ties in...
My last post dealt with the anthropological side of my discipline. Most of what we know about the history of the Indo-European people groups comes not from historical records per se, but from analysis and comparison of the languages in which those historical records were composed. Philology (“love of words”) is an old term used to describe those who read literature for appreciation of the language. Naturally, most philologists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were multilingual and well-read. It was this familiarity with multiple languages that led some to recognize similarities between the languages they were reading in, and as curiosity was given room, many of these philologists set out to figure out exactly the relationships between them. In so doing, they became intimately familiar with the language itself, not as it exists in practice, but in shared tendencies and similarities that must be chalked up to the innate nature of human language. Thus began the modern science of linguistics.
Because of ground-breaking work done in the 19th century, scholars discovered that sound change in language is a remarkably thoroughgoing, exceedingly systematic, and almost exceptionless process. These linguists realized that if they could determine what sound changes occurred in a given language, they would be able to reverse engineer the process and uncover an earlier state of the language. That principle of reconstruction is what historical linguistics is all about.
Systematic sound changes and changes in other aspects of language (such as in syntax, semantics, or morphology) are referred to as “laws”. For instance, a sound law that happened fairly recently in the transition from Middle to Modern English (c. 15th century) is known as the Great Vowel Shift, which was a drastic change in all the long vowels of Middle English and was responsible for the major differences between the way we pronounce and write our vowels and the way Spanish or other European languages do.
What historical linguists do is reconstruct language based on known laws using a combination of the comparative method and internal reconstruction.
Related posts:- Mysteries of my field of study revealed: the Birth of Historical Linguistics Earlier I made mention of the consistency of sound changes, what the nineteenth-century German grammarians called the Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze (the “exceptionlessness of sound change”) . The catalyst for this...
- Mysteries of my field of study revealed: the Indo-Europeans Germanic and Indo-European studies. What the heck is that? Well, let me start with a summary of the anthropological side of the discipline. Once upon a time, in an area...
- Education: the Christian’s Contribution to Society King Alfred the Great of England (r. 871-899) was truly one of the most remarkable men in history. The fifth son of the previous king of England, he was a...
Germanic and Indo-European studies. What the heck is that? Well, let me start with a summary of the anthropological side of the discipline.
Once upon a time, in an area hypothesized to be along the steppes of Russia, on the north side of the Black Sea, lived a people called the Indo-Europeans. They spoke a language we refer to as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Gradually over the period of 3000-2000 BC, tribes within that culture began to migrate to other areas, taking their particular dialects of late PIE with them. Eventually, this culture ended up splintered into several groups that spanned from Europe in the west to India and the Xinjiang region of northwest China. As time passed and isolation from other tribes increased, each of these dialects became their own distinct languages and evolved as languages always do so that by the time of recorded history there was little real mutual intelligibility between the non-contiguous tribal dialects; these dialects became the branches, or language families, of Indo-European.
Related posts:- Mysteries of my field of study revealed: the Birth of Historical Linguistics Earlier I made mention of the consistency of sound changes, what the nineteenth-century German grammarians called the Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze (the “exceptionlessness of sound change”) . The catalyst for this...
- Mysteries of my field of study revealed: the Tools of the Trade My last post dealt with the anthropological side of my discipline. Most of what we know about the history of the Indo-European people groups comes not from historical records per...
- Genetic map of Europe Click to enlarge The New York Times has published an article on the results of a genetic study that sought to show the genetic interrelationships of the peoples of...