Þema Ritsins 3/2019 er umhverfishugvísindi og samtími. Í inngangi sínum að þemanu fjalla ritstjórar um brýnt erindi umhverfishugvísindanna við samtímann og hvernig það birtist í ólíkum greinum heftisins. Á tímum hamfarahlýnunar er dýpri skilningur á nánd okkar við jörðina mikilvægur. Einnig er fjallað stuttlega um tilurð og þróun umhverfishugvísinda og þá þverfaglegu sýn sem einkennir þau oft á tíðum.
Í þessari grein er fjallað um þverfaglega rannsókn á fagurferðilegu gildi landslags sem unnin er á sviði umhverfishugvísinda. Til að varpa ljósi á samhengi og aðdraganda þeirrar rannsóknar er í fyrstu rakin saga landslagsrannsókna á Íslandi frá aldamótunum 2000, en frá þeim tíma hefur hugtakið landslag fest sig í sessi sem eitt af þeim viðmiðum sem horfa þarf til í ákvörðunum er varða skipulagsmál og landnýtingu. Innan háskólasamfélagsins og á verkfræðistofum hefur markvisst verið unnið að því að þróa aðferðir sem þjóna þeim tilgangi, en nokkuð hefur skort á samtal þar á milli, sem og sameiginlegan hugtakaskilning. Í þeirri rannsókn sem hér er fjallað um er þróuð ný aðferðafræði sem byggir á þeim hugtakaskilningi sem höfundar hafa leitt fram með fyrirbærafræðilegri nálgun innan heimspeki og mannvistarlandfræði. Hér eru dregnir fram valdir þættir hins fagurferðilega gildis og um þá fjallað í ljósi kenninga í náttúrufagurfræði, en umfjöllunin er angi stærri rannsóknar sem unnin var fyrir faghóp I í Rammaáætlun. Með þessari grein er varpað ljósi á gildi rannsókna á sviði umhverfishugvísinda þegar kemur að stjórnsýslulegum ákvörðunum er varða umhverfismál.
This article discusses the "Critical period" in language acquisition – based on the theory that children are born with the natural ability to learn language; an ability that gradually fades or disappears. According to this theory, children who are not privy to normal language stimulation during childhood miss their chance to acquire a language "perfectly".Critical periods do not only exist in language, e.g. children and other young animals need to receive visual stimulation for their vision to develop. The beginning of this article considers difference in opportunities for research, and thereby the state of knowledge concerning the critical period in vision, compared to language acquisition. The difference is based mainly on two factors: on the one hand, animals have been studied to elucidate the critical period in vision – an option that linguists do not have – and, on the other, it is quite common for children to lack visual stimulation, i.e. due to cataracts. It is less common for children to grow up without language stimulation, although stories exist of children that, for one reason or another, were deprived of human interaction during childhood. The author uses this opportunity to provide an account of two such stories, in a more detailed fashion than would be necessary to define the critical period in language acquisition. These are also stories of violence and questionable work methods for the sake of science. This is followed by a discussion of deaf children as, in the past – as well as the present day – it was common for them not to receive appropriate language stimulation from the beginning, i.e. via the use of sign language. The examples are so many that late language acquisition by deaf children can shed light on the critical period in language acquisition.Many have discussed the critical period in language acquisition but emphasis is often placed on that which has remained unlearned. This article asks rather what can be learned and whether language structure can be established despite a late start for the language acquisition process.
Hér er að finna þýðingu Ásdísar R. Magnúsdóttur á völdum brotum úr verkinu Hugsanir eftir Blaise Pascal sem kom fyrst út árið 1670. Hún skrifar einnig inngang að þýðingunni.
The Icelandic-English parallel corpus MaCoCu-is-en 1.0 was built by crawling the ".is" internet top-level domain in 2021, extending the crawl dynamically to other domains as well. All the crawling process was carried out by the MaCoCu crawler (https://github.com/macocu/MaCoCu-crawler). Websites containing documents in both target languages were identified and processed using the tool Bitextor (https://github.com/bitextor/bitextor). Considerable efforts were devoted into cleaning the extracted text to provide a high-quality parallel corpus. This was achieved by removing boilerplate and near-duplicated paragraphs and documents that are not in one of the targeted languages. Document and segment alignment as implemented in Bitextor were carried out, and BicleanerAI (https://github.com/bitextor/bicleaner-ai) and Bifixer (https://github.com/bitextor/bifixer) were used for fixing, cleaning, and deduplicating the final version of the corpus. While the TXT format consists solely of pairs of source and target segments (one or several sentences), each segment pair in the TMX format is accompanied by the following metadata: - source and target document URL; - quality score as provided by the tool BicleanerAI; - translation direction identification: the source segment in each segment pair was identified by using a probabilistic model; - personal information identification ("biroamer-entities"): segments containing personal information are flagged, so final users of the corpus can decide whether to use these segments; - language variants: the language variant of English (British or American) was identified for every segment pair on document and domain level. Notice and take down: Should you consider that our data contains material that is owned by you and should therefore not be reproduced here, please: (1) Clearly identify yourself, with detailed contact data such as an address, telephone number or email address at which you can be contacted. (2) Clearly identify the copyrighted work claimed to be infringed. (3) Clearly identify the material that is claimed to be infringing and information reasonably sufficient in order to allow us to locate the material. (4) Please write to the contact person for this resource whose email is available in the full item record. We will comply with legitimate requests by removing the affected sources from the next release of the corpus. This action has received funding from the European Union's Connecting Europe Facility 2014-2020 - CEF Telecom, under Grant Agreement No. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2020/2278341. This communication reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.
Kristín Gunnlaugsdóttir myndlistarkona (fædd 1963) gat sér gott orð undir lok tuttugustu aldar með áferðarfallegum verkum sem áttu sér oft trúarlegar fyrirmyndir. Myndheimur hennar tók breytingum um og eftir 2009 þegar myndirnar urðu tjáningarríkar og grófar með kynferðislegum undirtón. Á undanförnum árum hafa myndir hennar í auknum mæli svarið sig í ætt við grótesku. Í greininni er leitast við að skoða lykilverk í ferli Kristínar til að öðlast skilning á því hvernig verkin snerta á breyttan hátt við áhorfandanum eftir tímabilum. Verkin og áhrif þeirra eru greind með tilliti til kenninga R. Howards Blochs á þróun rómantískrar ástar, hugmynda Evu Illouz um sjónræna auðvaldshyggu, valdbeitingu á grundvelli kynlífshegðunar og efnahags og rannsókna Mary Russo á ímyndum gróteskra líkama kvenna í menningarlegu samhengi.
This paper discusses the history of the nouns gleðimaður, which is known from Old as well as Modern icelandic, and gleðikona which first occurs in an 18th-century source. Other nominal compounds for men and women that have gleði- as their first member are also introduced. The meaning of these words is compared, as is their usage, in order to test the claim that the words for men normally have a neutral meaning ('cheerful man, party animal') but the words for women have a pejorative meaning ('hussy, prostitute'). The nature of the changes in the history of the gleði-compounds is also discussed, e.g., to what extent borrowing from a foreign language has taken place. Lars-Gunnar Andersson's categorization of the so-called "ugliness" of words is used for a more detailed definition of the semantic changes. Finally, we touch on the wish to reclaim the word gleðikona that has been observed in the last decades, i.e., to revive the practically forgotten meaning 'cheerful woman, female party animal'.
Preliminary Material /P. Limb , N. Etherington and P. Midgley -- Indigenous Southern Africans And Colonialism: Introduction /Norman Etherington -- Reactions To Colonialism In Southern Africa: Some Historiographical Reflections /Chris Saunders -- Fenders Of Space: Kgatla Territorial Expansion Under Boer And British Rule, 1840–1920 /Fred Morton -- Intermediaries Of Class, Nation, And Gender In The African Response To Colonialism In South Africa, 1890s–1920s /Peter Limb -- Pastoral Modernity, Territoriality And Colonial Transformations In Central Namibia, 1860s–1904 /Dag Henrichsen -- Social And Political Responses To Colonialism On The Margins: Community, Chieftaincy And Ethnicity In Bulilima-Mangwe, Zimbabwe, 1890–1930 /Enocent Msindo -- Conflict And Negotiation Along The Lower Vaal River: Correspondence From The Tswana-Language Newspaper Mokaeri Oa Becuana /Stephen C. Volz and Part T. Mgadla -- Renaissance Men: Ntsikana, A. C. Jordan, S. E. K. Mqhayi And South Africa's Cultural Awakening /Peter Midgley -- African Intellectual And Literary Responses To Colonial Modernity In South Africa /Ntongela Masilela -- \'Then Came The Whiteman\': An African Poet And Polemicist On The Fateful Encounter /Grant Christison -- World Visions: 'Native Missionaries,' Mission Networks And Critiques Of Colonialism In Nineteenth-Century South Africa And Canada /Tolly Bradford -- Bibliography /P. Limb , N. Etherington and P. Midgley -- Index /P. Limb , N. Etherington and P. Midgley.
In the Icelandic traditional ballads from medieval and post-medieval times, wo-men and their voices are very prominent, while stories of male heroes were rather portrayed in rímur. The language is very unusual and shows signs of translation, formulas are frequently used, and the mode of narration is objective and clear. Love is a common subject, and so is violence, often gender-based and sexual. In the article the background of these ballads is discussed shortly and their emergence in Icelandic oral culture and later its literature, as they were recorded by educated men, from nameless sources, most probably women. Seven ballads are then used to show different aspects of violence within the genre. All are highly dramatic, and their subject is harsh: hardship, rape, birth and loss of children, and sometimes the victims take things into their own hands and avenge in a graphic way. How ballads that tell such terrible tales, can have been sung and danced to at joyous gatherings, is an interesting food for thought. It will be reasoned that these ballads have primarily been sung by women, and they can even have been a consolation and a tool to deal with gender-based violence in their own lives.
Should the progress in the biological sciences during the last decades give rise to a re-evaluation of literary analysis? The paper opens with a discussion of this question with reference to a fragment of Dagur Sigurðarson's poem "Takk takk Tobbi", pub-lished in Rógmálmur og grásilfur (1971). The question is answered partly affirmative-ly, mostly on the grounds that embodied cognition has to be taken into account when analysing literature. It is pointed out that among the factors that have contributed to a better understanding of the complex relation between the body and language is recent research on Tourette syndrome. The relationship between this neurological disorder and poetry is the main subject of the paper and it is discussed with refer-ence to a scaldic strophe from The Saga of Gisli Sursson. First, Tourette-syndrome is discussed briefly, including the medical profession's stance toward it during the 19thand 20th century and scholarly work on the common traits that the disorder shares with poetry. Subsequently it is considered how these writings can benefit literary scholarship, Gisli Sursson's strophe is analysed and it is proposed that this analysis can't rely on metrical rules alone. Then the aforementioned poem by Dagur Sig-urðarson is reconsidered, and finally a few points are recapitulated.
