Suchergebnisse

In this article we examine, from a predominantly sociolinguistic perspective, the writing systems created throughout time for the graphic rendering of the variety of Romanian spoken by the Vlachs of Eastern Serbia. We especially investigate what influences the choice of a script (Latin or Cyrillic), of orthographic conventions and of a writing system, and how this choice correlates with the ideological attitude (reintegrationist or independentist) of the proponents. To this end, we analyse the writing systems used for rendering the vernacular in "Vorba noastră", the first publication in the local variety (1945–1948), and the systems put forward in the last 20 years by the members of the community engaged in political and linguistic debates (Paun Es Durlić, Dragomir Dragić, Slavoljub Gacović, Ljubiša lu Boža Kići, the "Gergina" Association). The analysis and the comparison of the systems attest to the importance of the ideological, social and political factors in creating and imposing an orthography for an unwritten idiom.

Despite the flourishing of epichoric studies on the Archaic Greek scripts in the 1960s, embodied by archaeologists Lilian Hamilton Jeffery and Margherita Guarducci, most scholarship on early alphabetic writing in Greece has focused on questions around the origin of 'the Greek alphabet' instead of acknowledging the diversity of alphabetic systems that emerged in Geometric and Archaic times. The present book proposes to bring back the epichoric approach by focusing on the different ways in which the earliest epigraphic evidence represents the spoken Greek dialects. However, instead of continuing the palaeographic methodology of previous studies, this analysis follows the latest trends in grapholinguistics, more specifically the methodology of comparative graphematics. By examining the grapheme-phoneme relationships across Greek-speaking regions, it is possible to recognize that diversity and to draw connections with neighboring contemporaneous alphabets, such as those for Phrygian, Eteocretan and Etruscan. This work, carried out within the Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) project, aims to contribute towards the conceptualization of the so-called epichoric scripts as independent alphabets, as well as their framing within the ecology of ancient Mediterranean writing systems. Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) is a project funded by the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 677758), and based in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.

Abstract: Unlike China's earliest readable texts, the late Shāng 商 (13th-11th c. BCE) 'oracle bone inscrip­tions', preserved mostly on water turtle plastrons and bovine shoulder blades (jiǎgǔwén 甲骨文), which were largely forgotten until their rediscovery at the turn to the last century, bronze in­scriptions (jīnwén 金文), attested from the 12th century BCE onwards, seem to have been always known and were occasionally mentioned throughout the classical period. They were first system­atically cataloged during the Northern Sòng 宋 dynasty (960-1127). It was already during this ini­tial phase of scholar­ship already that several authors noticed that some of the most archaic bronze texts include graphs with a strongly "pictograph" character, often clearly distinct in posi­tion, size and ductus from the more linear and abstract graph shapes en­countered in the texts which they accompany. The famous Chinese paleographer and writer Guō Mòruò 郭沫若 (1892-1978) first called these graphs "lineage symbols" (zú huī 族徽) in a study published in 1930, where he argued that they represent quasi-totemic identity markers of ancient Shāng lineages and poli­ties and stressed their status as proto-writing. While Guō's theory continues to receive wide sup­port in Western and Chinese studies on the subject, there is no lack of controversies about whether they should be classified and analyzed as "glottographic" writ­ing sensu strictu or rather as "emblems", i.e. non-linguistic symbol systems, functioning somewhat like heraldic signs or "coats of arms" in various Europan traditions. Nor is there any clear consensus, whether they repr­esent names of individuals, kin-, lineage- or ex­ogamy-based groups, or even other social and political entities. Proceeding from the most recent catalog and study of these signs (Hé Jǐngchéng 2009), I will first introduce the extant corpus some 900 simplex graphs, summarize the recent Chinese and Japa­nese scholarship on their archaeological contexts, distributional patterns and possible relation­ship towards ...

The Russian spelling reform of 1917-1918 was very successful - so successful that many young Russians, when confronted with a pre-1917 Russian text, do not know how to read , or . However, many reforms of writing systems have not met with success. Among them are the 1930 attempt to convert Russian to the Latin alphabet; the Second Chinese Character Simplification Scheme of 1977, which the PRC government had to withdraw in 1986; the French spelling reform of 1990, which is still ignored by most of the public; and the Latinization of Uzbek of 1993-1995, gether fifteen years, has not been implemented by newspapers and magazines. This paper examines a range of writing reforms (script reforms, spelling reforms, and glyphic reforms) - mainly from the Slavic and post-Soviet area - to determine which factors influence the success or failure of a reform and to what extent. Among the factors considered are the orthographic principles touched by the reform; the motivation for it; the scientific arguments put forward in the discussion; the semiotic values associated with the reformed writing system; the timing; the political system of the country; and the literacy rate of the speech community. The results of this analysis might be a bit disillusioning for us as linguists because linguistic factors turn out to play a very minor role compared to extralinguistic factors. In fact, the most decisive factor seems to be timing.

The Russian spelling reform of 1917-1918 was very successful – so successful that many young Russians, when confronted with a pre-1917 Russian text, do not know how to read 〈ѣ〉, 〈ѳ〉 or 〈ея〉. However, many reforms of writing systems have not met with success. Among them are the 1930 attempt to convert Russian to the Latin alphabet; the Second Chinese Character Simplification Scheme of 1977, which the PRC government had to withdraw in 1986; the French spelling reform of 1990, which is still ignored by most of the public; and the Latinisation of Uzbek of 1993-1995, which, even twenty years later and after the end of the twice extended 'transitional period' of altogether fifteen years, has not been implemented by newspapers and magazines. This paper examines a range of writing reforms (script reforms, spelling reforms, and glyphic reforms) – mainly from the Slavic and post-Soviet area – to determine which factors influence the success or failure of a reform and to what extent. Among the factors considered are the orthographic principles touched by the reform; the motivation for it; the scientific arguments put forward in the discussion; the semiotic values associated with the reformed writing system; the timing; the political system of the country; and the literacy rate of the speech community. The results of this analysis might be a bit disillusioning for us as linguists because linguistic factors turn out to play a very minor role compared to extralinguistic factors. In fact, the most decisive factor seems to be timing.

Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) is a project funded by the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 677758), and based in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge. Understanding Relations Between Scripts II: Early Alphabets is the first volume in this series, bringing together ten experts on ancient writing, languages and archaeology to present a set of diverse studies on the early development of alphabetic writing systems and their spread across the Levant and Mediterranean during the second and first millennia BC. By taking an interdisciplinary perspective, it sheds new light on alphabetic writing not just as a tool for recording language but also as an element of culture.

Over 1975-2003 nearly 200 new constitutions were drawn up in countries at risk of conflict, as part of peace processes and the adoption of multiparty political systems. The process of writing constitutions is considered to be very important to the chances of sustaining peace, and The Commonwealth and the US Institute for Peace have developed good practice guidelines in this area. These emphasize consultation, openness to diverse points of view and representative ratification procedures. But assessing the impact of constitution-writing processes on violence is methodologically difficult, since there are many channels of influence in the relationship. This paper reports on preliminary findings from an ongoing research project into the effects of processes in constitution-writing. Regression analysis is used to control for important contextual features such as differences in income levels and ethnic diversity across countries. A key finding is that differences in the degree of participation in the drafting of constitutions has no major effect on post-ratification levels of violence in some parts of the world, such as Europe, but does make a difference in Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific together. – constitutions ; Commonwealth ; democracy ; governance

"Race Writing in the Internet Age" argues that the intensified forms of global economic integration made possible by Internet technologies have defined contemporary "postrace" narratives—narratives that, in turn, both formally embody and thematically challenge the racial ideologies that subtend this integration. The Japanese coders, South Asian hackers, "cyber coolies," African-American app designers, Korean- and Taiwanese-American social media addicts, and Nigerian "yahoo boys" who populate the contemporary American novel elaborate key contradictions between the "postracial" world of social technology and the global wage differentials that attend and make possible the Internet itself. In novels by Teju Cole, Bharati Mukherjee, Ruth Ozeki, Ed Park, Ishmael Reed, Gary Shteyngart, Colson Whitehead, and others, race disappears into a colorblind Web run through apparently abstract software algorithms, only to reappear in the wage gap between developed and undeveloped nations. However, these novels do not simply construct race in accordance with capitalist imperatives: they also sublimate technology into form, in ways that must change inherited understandings of the contemporary novel's relation to the information and communication technologies alongside which it came of age. Reading the "postrace" novel in light of new interdisciplinary research on the cultural implications of software systems and computer code, fresh interest in formalist analysis, and ongoing work on global political economy, "Race Writing in the Internet Age" discovers a range of contemporary writers turning to algorithmic forms—computational techniques for market forecasting, models of viral transmission and social networking, the underlying principles of Web browsing and search—as a way of illustrating race's reconfiguration within the tech-integrated global market.

В данной статье рассматривается случай изобретения логографического письма чукчей Тыневилем в 1920-е гг. Данный феномен анализируется не с лингвистической, а с антропологической точки зрения, то есть цель работы состоит в том, чтобы приблизиться к пониманию того, как письмо использовалось, каковы были предпосылки и следствия этого использования и социально-культурный контекст его изобретения и функционирования. Обращение к биографии Тыневиля и исторической ситуации второй четверти XX в. на Чукотке позволяет сделать вывод, что письмо стало своего рода компромиссом для создателя, формой диалога с государством, попыткой приспособиться к социальным изменениям, происходившим на Чукотке в то время. Тыневиль, подражая знаковой системе «другой культуры», в результате создал альтернативную чукотскую, «свою». ; This paper investigates the case of the a Chukchi man, Tynevil, and his invention of a writing system in 1920s. The phenomenon is analyzed not from a linguistic, but rather from an anthropological point of view. The goal of the article is to approach an understanding of how the writing was used, what the causes and consequences of this use were, and what the sociocultural context of its invention and application was. I interpret the data about Tynevil and his signs by using micro-historical approach. An analysis of Tynevil's biography and historical context during the second quarter of the XX century leads to the conclusion that the invention was a kind of compromise for the creator, a form of the dialogue with the Soviet state, and an attempt to adapt to the social changes that were taking place in the Chukotka region at that time. In the context of the Chukchi's wary and sometimes hostile attitude toward Russians' capacity to write and moreover forcible liquidation of illiteracy among local people, Tynevil created written signs himself. Imitating the writing systems of "other cultures", he ultimately created an alternative one the Chukchi's "own" writing.

International audience ; : Too few scholars are dedicated to Occitan studies. There are a lot of reasons for such a situation, among which the social and political status of the language is not the least. Occitan studies also are affected by a split in the research attitudes and conceptions. Specifically, there is no regular continuity between works describing dialectal varieties and works contributing to corpus planning, even when the former ones don't undervalue the language status and the latter ones don't ignore dialect complexity. We shall not try here to analyse the reasons for this difficult cooperation. We only want make it clear, on the basis of a few examples, that the orthographic codification of Occitan not only has a practical relevance (allowing to write, use and teach the language), but also is a valuable scientific and descriptive tool . In order to do so, we shall first explain the principles of the so-called "classical" Occitan orthography and we shall then indicate how lemmatizing on the basis of this notation strongly helps organize, from inside the language, the huge wealth of lexical and morphological data included in Thesaurus Occitan (THESOC, cf. Dalbera 1998 and for an online sample : http://thesaurus.unice.fr/). ; Les études occitanes souffrent d'un manque de chercheurs. Les causes en sont multiples et ne sont pas étrangères au statut social et politique de la langue. Les études occitanes souffrent de plus d'une segmentation des pratiques et des réflexions. Spécifiquement, la circulation n'est pas facile entre la description des variétés dialectales de l'occitan (même pénétrée de la dignité de la langue) et la codification (même bien informée de la réalité dialectale). Notre propos n'est pas ici d'analyser les raisons de ces dysfonctionnements, mais de montrer par l'exemple que la codification graphique de l'occitan a une utilité scientifique et descriptive, en plus de sa pertinence pratique première (écrire, utiliser et enseigner la langue) . Pour ce faire, nous présenterons ici la ...

International audience ; : Too few scholars are dedicated to Occitan studies. There are a lot of reasons for such a situation, among which the social and political status of the language is not the least. Occitan studies also are affected by a split in the research attitudes and conceptions. Specifically, there is no regular continuity between works describing dialectal varieties and works contributing to corpus planning, even when the former ones don't undervalue the language status and the latter ones don't ignore dialect complexity. We shall not try here to analyse the reasons for this difficult cooperation. We only want make it clear, on the basis of a few examples, that the orthographic codification of Occitan not only has a practical relevance (allowing to write, use and teach the language), but also is a valuable scientific and descriptive tool . In order to do so, we shall first explain the principles of the so-called "classical" Occitan orthography and we shall then indicate how lemmatizing on the basis of this notation strongly helps organize, from inside the language, the huge wealth of lexical and morphological data included in Thesaurus Occitan (THESOC, cf. Dalbera 1998 and for an online sample : http://thesaurus.unice.fr/). ; Les études occitanes souffrent d'un manque de chercheurs. Les causes en sont multiples et ne sont pas étrangères au statut social et politique de la langue. Les études occitanes souffrent de plus d'une segmentation des pratiques et des réflexions. Spécifiquement, la circulation n'est pas facile entre la description des variétés dialectales de l'occitan (même pénétrée de la dignité de la langue) et la codification (même bien informée de la réalité dialectale). Notre propos n'est pas ici d'analyser les raisons de ces dysfonctionnements, mais de montrer par l'exemple que la codification graphique de l'occitan a une utilité scientifique et descriptive, en plus de sa pertinence pratique première (écrire, utiliser et enseigner la langue) . Pour ce faire, nous présenterons ici la ...

International audience ; : Too few scholars are dedicated to Occitan studies. There are a lot of reasons for such a situation, among which the social and political status of the language is not the least. Occitan studies also are affected by a split in the research attitudes and conceptions. Specifically, there is no regular continuity between works describing dialectal varieties and works contributing to corpus planning, even when the former ones don't undervalue the language status and the latter ones don't ignore dialect complexity. We shall not try here to analyse the reasons for this difficult cooperation. We only want make it clear, on the basis of a few examples, that the orthographic codification of Occitan not only has a practical relevance (allowing to write, use and teach the language), but also is a valuable scientific and descriptive tool . In order to do so, we shall first explain the principles of the so-called "classical" Occitan orthography and we shall then indicate how lemmatizing on the basis of this notation strongly helps organize, from inside the language, the huge wealth of lexical and morphological data included in Thesaurus Occitan (THESOC, cf. Dalbera 1998 and for an online sample : http://thesaurus.unice.fr/). ; Les études occitanes souffrent d'un manque de chercheurs. Les causes en sont multiples et ne sont pas étrangères au statut social et politique de la langue. Les études occitanes souffrent de plus d'une segmentation des pratiques et des réflexions. Spécifiquement, la circulation n'est pas facile entre la description des variétés dialectales de l'occitan (même pénétrée de la dignité de la langue) et la codification (même bien informée de la réalité dialectale). Notre propos n'est pas ici d'analyser les raisons de ces dysfonctionnements, mais de montrer par l'exemple que la codification graphique de l'occitan a une utilité scientifique et descriptive, en plus de sa pertinence pratique première (écrire, utiliser et enseigner la langue) . Pour ce faire, nous présenterons ici la ...

International audience ; : Too few scholars are dedicated to Occitan studies. There are a lot of reasons for such a situation, among which the social and political status of the language is not the least. Occitan studies also are affected by a split in the research attitudes and conceptions. Specifically, there is no regular continuity between works describing dialectal varieties and works contributing to corpus planning, even when the former ones don't undervalue the language status and the latter ones don't ignore dialect complexity. We shall not try here to analyse the reasons for this difficult cooperation. We only want make it clear, on the basis of a few examples, that the orthographic codification of Occitan not only has a practical relevance (allowing to write, use and teach the language), but also is a valuable scientific and descriptive tool . In order to do so, we shall first explain the principles of the so-called "classical" Occitan orthography and we shall then indicate how lemmatizing on the basis of this notation strongly helps organize, from inside the language, the huge wealth of lexical and morphological data included in Thesaurus Occitan (THESOC, cf. Dalbera 1998 and for an online sample : http://thesaurus.unice.fr/). ; Les études occitanes souffrent d'un manque de chercheurs. Les causes en sont multiples et ne sont pas étrangères au statut social et politique de la langue. Les études occitanes souffrent de plus d'une segmentation des pratiques et des réflexions. Spécifiquement, la circulation n'est pas facile entre la description des variétés dialectales de l'occitan (même pénétrée de la dignité de la langue) et la codification (même bien informée de la réalité dialectale). Notre propos n'est pas ici d'analyser les raisons de ces dysfonctionnements, mais de montrer par l'exemple que la codification graphique de l'occitan a une utilité scientifique et descriptive, en plus de sa pertinence pratique première (écrire, utiliser et enseigner la langue) . Pour ce faire, nous présenterons ici la ...

International audience ; : Too few scholars are dedicated to Occitan studies. There are a lot of reasons for such a situation, among which the social and political status of the language is not the least. Occitan studies also are affected by a split in the research attitudes and conceptions. Specifically, there is no regular continuity between works describing dialectal varieties and works contributing to corpus planning, even when the former ones don't undervalue the language status and the latter ones don't ignore dialect complexity. We shall not try here to analyse the reasons for this difficult cooperation. We only want make it clear, on the basis of a few examples, that the orthographic codification of Occitan not only has a practical relevance (allowing to write, use and teach the language), but also is a valuable scientific and descriptive tool . In order to do so, we shall first explain the principles of the so-called "classical" Occitan orthography and we shall then indicate how lemmatizing on the basis of this notation strongly helps organize, from inside the language, the huge wealth of lexical and morphological data included in Thesaurus Occitan (THESOC, cf. Dalbera 1998 and for an online sample : http://thesaurus.unice.fr/). ; Les études occitanes souffrent d'un manque de chercheurs. Les causes en sont multiples et ne sont pas étrangères au statut social et politique de la langue. Les études occitanes souffrent de plus d'une segmentation des pratiques et des réflexions. Spécifiquement, la circulation n'est pas facile entre la description des variétés dialectales de l'occitan (même pénétrée de la dignité de la langue) et la codification (même bien informée de la réalité dialectale). Notre propos n'est pas ici d'analyser les raisons de ces dysfonctionnements, mais de montrer par l'exemple que la codification graphique de l'occitan a une utilité scientifique et descriptive, en plus de sa pertinence pratique première (écrire, utiliser et enseigner la langue) . Pour ce faire, nous présenterons ici la ...

International audience ; : Too few scholars are dedicated to Occitan studies. There are a lot of reasons for such a situation, among which the social and political status of the language is not the least. Occitan studies also are affected by a split in the research attitudes and conceptions. Specifically, there is no regular continuity between works describing dialectal varieties and works contributing to corpus planning, even when the former ones don't undervalue the language status and the latter ones don't ignore dialect complexity. We shall not try here to analyse the reasons for this difficult cooperation. We only want make it clear, on the basis of a few examples, that the orthographic codification of Occitan not only has a practical relevance (allowing to write, use and teach the language), but also is a valuable scientific and descriptive tool . In order to do so, we shall first explain the principles of the so-called "classical" Occitan orthography and we shall then indicate how lemmatizing on the basis of this notation strongly helps organize, from inside the language, the huge wealth of lexical and morphological data included in Thesaurus Occitan (THESOC, cf. Dalbera 1998 and for an online sample : http://thesaurus.unice.fr/). ; Les études occitanes souffrent d'un manque de chercheurs. Les causes en sont multiples et ne sont pas étrangères au statut social et politique de la langue. Les études occitanes souffrent de plus d'une segmentation des pratiques et des réflexions. Spécifiquement, la circulation n'est pas facile entre la description des variétés dialectales de l'occitan (même pénétrée de la dignité de la langue) et la codification (même bien informée de la réalité dialectale). Notre propos n'est pas ici d'analyser les raisons de ces dysfonctionnements, mais de montrer par l'exemple que la codification graphique de l'occitan a une utilité scientifique et descriptive, en plus de sa pertinence pratique première (écrire, utiliser et enseigner la langue) . Pour ce faire, nous présenterons ici la ...