Philology

This chapter investigates the specific philological practice of textual criticism and explores how this highly valued methodology was adopted by Jewish scholars working in the German-speaking world of the nineteenth century as part of the modernizing intellectual movement of Wissenschaft des Judentums. It explores how this movement depended on specific methodological engagement with a classical past. In particular, it focuses on how one leading rabbi and scholar, Zacharias Fraenkel (1801-1875), studied Greek philology in order to redraft Christian supersessionist historiography, which in the nineteenth century was composing a particular but profoundly distorting historical account of early Judaism, based on new philological methods. Fraenkel used the new historical philology of the 19th-century German and Central European university to create a theologically-laden account of ancient Jewish society, not as a dying religion but as a vital creative culture.
For article with full bibliography, see https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/classical-philology-and-theology/9B963F9027CFBEFBF8A7E91CE85003A5.

This essay approaches the Silk Road as a modern narrative of China’s connected past, rather than as a historical fact. The Chinese term Silk Road (sichou zhi lu; 丝绸之路) first gained currency after the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung as part of the lexicon of anticolonial solidarity. During the ColdWar, China’s Afro-Asian Silk Road, different from the West’s Europe-Asia Silk Road, prompted new interest in the linguistic dimension of connected history. Language contact traditionally held limited significance in European and Chinese philology because linguistic divisions were understood in terms of nation or language family. For Afro-Asian scholars and writers, however, precolonial language contact became a portent of postcolonial exchange. They shifted attention from genetic word roots to historical routes (e.g., loanwords). Within a longer history of what I call “contact philology,” China’s short-lived collaborations refashioned the Orient as Afro-Asia and presented an (unfinished) critique of the tropes with which we narrate the connected past.

Many claims have been made linking ancient languages with genetically identified prehistoric and modern populations. There is much new ‘evidence’ and intense debate on the validity and appropriateness of such interdisciplinary work. Here Patrick Sims-Williams provides a timely comment on linguistics and the quest for ancient populations.

Analysis of the development of Medieval Studies across Europe and north America in the 1930s, with special reference to Germany, France, Belgium, Italy (with Ethiopia and Somalia), Iceland, Réunion, Ireland, Istanbul, the USA, England, and the British empire; the Alps, the Danube, and the Rhine; Jewish Studies, women and the profession.

This article discusses a problem in integrating archaeology and philology. For most of the twentieth century, archaeologists associated the spread of the Celtic languages with the supposed westward spread of the ‘eastern Hallstatt culture’ in the first millennium BC. More recently, some have discarded ‘Celtic from the East’ in favour of ‘Celtic from the West’, according to which Celtic was a much older lingua franca which evolved from a hypothetical Neolithic Proto-Indo-European language in the Atlantic zone and then spread eastwards in the third millennium BC. This article (1) criticizes the assumptions and misinterpretations of classical texts and onomastics that led to ‘Celtic from the East’ in the first place; (2) notes the unreliability of the linguistic evidence for ‘Celtic from the West’, namely (i) ‘glottochronology’ (which assumes that languages change at a steady rate), (ii) misunderstood place-name distribution maps and (iii) the undeciphered inscriptions in southwest Iberia; and (3) proposes that Celtic radiating from France during the first millennium BC would be a more economical explanation of the known facts.

The article takes a close look at Jacob Grimm's astonishing account of measurement in his lesser-known studies on the history of law. Grimm gives a thorough description of concrete quantification of property and the measurement of economic value in a European rural setting. Both techniques are considered a necessary 'infrastructure' for any use of money, yet his exposition is curiously devoid of numbers. Instead, 'poetic' and procedural scripts of measurement take center stage. However, these qualitative procedures are not contrasted to quantitative ones in any expectable way. In Grimm's polemic, precise quantification emerges as a shorthand for administrative regimes that circumvent and prohibit negotiation, appearing to be less rational and more socially binding.

The Amaraughaprabodha is a Sanskrit Śaiva yoga text attributed by its colophons to Gorakṣanātha. It was published by Kalyani Devi Mallik in 1954 and has been discussed in various secondary sources. Most notably, Christian Bouy (1994, pp. 18-19) identified this work as a source text for the Haṭhapradīpikā of Svātmārāma (mid-fifteenth century). This article presents new manuscript evidence for a shorter recension of the Amaraughaprabodha than the one published by Mallik. Comparing the differences between the short and long recensions reveals that the structure of the shorter one is more cohesive and closer to the original design of the work. The close relationship of the Amaraughaprabodha's short recension with an eleventh-century Vajrayāna work on yoga called the Amṛtasiddhi provides unique insights into how early teachings on Haṭhayoga were formulated. Although the practice of the physical techniques is largely the same in both texts, the author of the Amaraughaprabodha removed or obscured Vajrayāna terminology, added Śaiva metaphysics and framed Haṭhayoga as subordinate to a Śaiva yoga known as Rājayoga. This article proposes that the Amaraughaprabodha's short recension is probably the earliest known work to combine Haṭha- with Rājayoga, on the basis of this recension's close relationship with the Amṛtasiddhi, its rudimentary nature and the likelihood that Svātmārāma used it, and not the long recension, for composing the Haṭhapradīpikā.

Meister Alexander’s Minneleich is a long and complex Middle High German song, which can only be fully understood by analyzing text, music, transmission, and the interplay among them. This study combines literary, codicological, and musicological approaches in order to reach such an understanding. Co-authored with David William Hughes.

Waking from a vivid dream, the sage finds himself lost between worlds of possibility and ultimately transformed. Zhuangzi's famous butterfly story may seem familiar, but the text-linguistic structures of its broader interpretive context are little discussed and poorly understood. In this paper I argue that the Qíwùlùn 齊物論 chapter, like so many other ancient writings, is composed in a concentric, chiastic pattern, with sections in each half mirroring each other throughout, while the central sections provide a pivotal peak and interpretive key that radiate meaning back out to the margins. To quote Mary Douglas, "the meaning is in the middle." The middle is also the place of Peircean Thirdness. In this paper I map the chapter's text-level chiastic structures and trace its intimations of Peircean semiotic pragmatism. The core rings of the text endorse contrite fallibilism while also prefiguring triadic structure, the pragmatic maxim, and the continuity thesis. Referencing cultural and historical contexts plus recent scholarship on Zhuangzi and Peirce, I ultimately argue that this ancient text, like the pragmatist semiotic it foreshadows, can be better appreciated and applied by embracing the interplay of centers and margins, discarding debilitating ideologies, and waking up to new degrees of freedom.

A brief scholion allusion to a “Selenite” community in Arcadia raises a question concerning this epithet and its meaning on the background of similar expressions denoting extreme antiquity. At the core of this analysis stands the Classical tendency to highly appreciate early periods of time and early peoples. This opens up a discussion of autochthony and the concept of extreme antiquity, particularly associated with Arcadia. The conclusion offers a new interpretation of a neglected term

The etymologies of English blood and bone are obscure. Although their cognates are well represented in the Germanic family, both lack clear cognates in other Indo-European languages. Various explanations of their origins have been proposed, including that they may be non-Indo-European (e.g. Hawkins 1987). Blood and bone, and their cognates, share an initial /b/ with numerous body-related words (e.g. beard, breast, bosom) throughout Germanic. This initial /b/ constitutes a phonestheme. Phonesthemes-'recurring sound-meaning pairings that are not clearly contrastive morphemes' (Bergen 2004: 290)-are present in many Germanic languages, but their role in lexicogenesis is little understood. I suggest that blood and bone were formed by blending the initial /b/ phonestheme with two preexisting lexemes: Proto-Germanic*flōda-'something that flows' and *staina-'stone.' Phonesthetic blending may be a fruitful avenue for future etymological research.

Although the Ancients placed great emphasis on delivery, modern rhetorical scholars often overlook the oral dimensions of speech. Speech is powerful because of its ability to elicit a somatic response. Scholars in other disciplines are examining how speech affects the body, but contemporary rhetorical scholarship often overlooks their findings. This essay reviews scholarship both inside and outside of communication studies that demonstrates the interplay between rhetoric and orality, paying particular attention to how scientific scholarship can inform our conception of ethos and pathos. By drawing together scientific and rhetorical scholarship, scholars in all disciplines can gain a greater understanding of how speech affects the mind, body, and soul.

On the Necessary Unity of Trees and Waves in Historical Reconstruction: The Case of Phowa. Linkage models of language diversification (Ross 1988, François 2014) represent the slow differentiation of closely related sister languages via dialect continua. Such historical relationships are said to prevent the reconstruction of branch-internal phylogeny. A newly defined mode of linkage variation challenges this restriction. In cladistic hinge diversification, speakers of a geographically central variety mediate innovations between isolated extremes of a sub-branch, while all three daughter branches maintain evidence of their own exclusive innovations. The resulting pattern blends linkage relations with family relations. Following a contextual review, the paper presents supporting evidence for the distinction from the Phowa languages of southwest China (Ngwi < Burmic < Tibeto-Burman). Data analysis includes sociohistory, dialectometry and genetic linguistic components. The argument affirms both wave and tree models of language change, enabling an enriched understanding of focal, relic and transition areas and their influence on the leveling, development and diffusion of linguistic innovations.

This article elaborates upon Dell Hymes’s contributions to
dialogic anthropology by comparing two accounts of Apache lives, one spoken by Lawrence Mithlo to Harry Hoijer and published in a 1938 text collection, and another spoken by Eva Lupe to the author in 1996. First, I show that neither account is cast by its speaker as neutral information; rather, both are extensions of an oratorical genre labeled bá’hadziih, through which the speaker presents a group with which she identifies to an audience that includes those figured
as other. Through bá’hadziih the speaker attempts to transform the relationship between her own group and the addressed others by first invoking what she anticipates to be the image held of her group from the other’s point of view and then posing terms for its transformation. I show that a parallel strategy is also evident in a short creation narrative performed by Mithlo for Hoijer. I show that the ethnological framework within which Hoijer casts Mithlo’s performances
interposes a colonial lens that misrecognizes, with unintended
irony, what Mithlo frames as misunderstandings on the part of White
people as straightforward statements of fact. By contrast, considerations of genre and addressivity introduced via Hymes’s ethnography of communication and ethnopoetics enable a latter-day
recognition of the terms of mediation utilized by persons like Mithlo and Lupe to address researchers in ethnographic dialogues. A commentary to this essay by Richard Bauman appears later in this special issue.

The Instituto de Filología at the Universidad de Buenos Aires owed its creation in 1922 to an eminent intellectual, Ricardo Rojas, dean of the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras at the time, who expected that the development of the humanities would help to reinvigorate and nationalise a society considered too materialistic and without identity. The first directors of the Institute were part of Ramón Menéndez Pidal's school in Madrid, who went to Buenos Aires to collaborate with the new institution, but with their own research interests and a political neo-colonialist agenda. The expected encounter between an Argentine nationalist institution and a group of well-trained philologists from another country was forceful and had a different outcome, giving birth to a centre of scientific excellence, but with different goals and tasks.

In the first half of the 19th century, the now largely forgotten Copenhagen-based Icelander Finnur Magnússon was considered Europe’s leading authority on Old Norse literature and runic inscriptions. His expert knowledge was called upon by scholars like the Grimm brothers, and his ground-breaking publications on Eddic mythology were inspired by the newest theories in comparative linguistics and philology. Finnur, an admirer of both Rasmus Rask and Walter Scott, dedicated himself to the emancipation of Old Norse mythology vis-à-vis hegemonial classical culture, and defended it ferociously against attacks of the so-called ‘anti-Eddists’. He also encouraged Nordic artists to turn to the Eddas for inspiration in their search for truly ‘national’ motifs. After his reputation was permanently destroyed due to his involvement in the ‘Runamo controversy’, Finnur’s legacy disappeared into oblivion, and his profound significance in the first generation of Icelandic (Romantic) nationalists has been overlooked ever since. What did his contribution to the fledgling national discourse in Iceland consist of? And how did his ideas on Nordic culture and mythology influence the Romantic movement in Scandinavia?
Scandinavian Journal of History 40:2 (2015) p.p. 239-270.

The tractates of Niddah, Bekhorot, and Hullin investigate the generation of material bodies through ritual and status frameworks concerned with purity, dietary rules, sacrifice, property, and kinship. Drawing on insights from feminist science studies and new materialisms, I chart how nascent or emergent bodily materials were parsed in rabbinic science to then be theoretically donated, married, killed, ingested, or otherwise disposed. I show how the rabbis envisaged bodily products along a spectrum, drawing only a thin line between offspring (valad) and other material entities, with determinations of materiality and species factoring into such distinctions. Besides the content of rabbinic knowledge, I consider the conditions in which these knowledges were formulated. Feminist science studies and new materialist analyses of knowledge-making and agency offer approaches that go beyond dualist framings of active, knowing subjects (e. g. rabbinic men, humans, Romans) versus passive known objects (e. g. non-rabbis or women, non-human entities, or non-Romans). These approaches allow us to account for the ways in which rabbinic thinkers, from ca. the second through late fourth centuries, were entangled with and shaped by the "bodies" of their knowledge. Collectively, these approaches to the generation of bodily material and to the production of rabbinic knowledge thereof, make for a late ancient biology that differs from contemporary, "common sense," Euro-American intuitions about the distinction between living and nonliving, between human and nonhuman, and between knower and known. Furthermore, this biology queers accounts of generation that rely on same-species, heterosexual reproduction.

This paper argues that German literary studies was, from its inception, an entirely nationalist and nation-building endeavor, perhaps the quintessential nationalist project. Among the discipline's foundational premises are its belief in and commitment to a diversity of culturally individuated national communities (rather than one uniform humanity), a non-hierarchical plurality of vernaculars (rather than classical languages), and historically inflected and culturally expressive aesthetic forms (rather than transhistorically and transregionally valid templates of excellence). Three disciplinary activities of early Germanistik—Germanic historical linguistics, vernacular canon formation, and national literary history—are introduced as key instruments of nationalization. In conclusion, the paper claims that contemporary German Studies in the US, thankfully a reflective and critical enterprise, nonetheless remains institutionally completely dependent on the paradigm of the linguistically and culturally defined nation.

Marr’s critique of Indo-European philology is analysed in the light of contemporary postcolonial theory, showing how Marr considered “Indo-Europeanism” to be something very close to a Foucauldian discourse of power/knowledge. It is suggested that here one finds both the strengths and weakness of Marr’s ideas, which alerts us to certain problems in much postcolonial theory today. Genetic connections between Marr’s ideas and contemporary postcolonial studies are revealed. Marr’s ideas are then compared to the critique of the ideology of the Aryan supremacy developed by the Indian anti-caste intellectuals Phule and Ambedkar, in which the symbiotic relationship between imperial philology and brahman domination over the lower castes were revealed and subjected to critique. Important continuities are identified, and it is suggested that an approach to the interaction between European powers and colonial peoples’ needs to pay particular attention to the social divisions among the latter and the complex modes of dialogue that accompanied colonialism and its aftermath.

Full text here: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/MkICWbyMP7JcWQ26gZwm/full

Keywords: Ambedkar, Babasheb, Aryan, colonialism, Foucault, Michel, Marr, Nikolai, philology, Phule, Jotirao, Said, Edward

This study examines the script crisis that emerged in China during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the old ideology of state phonocentrism and the new wave of computer science demanded the abandoning of Chinese char- acters altogether. Under the project of establishing new human-machine inter- faces, national debates over such technical issues as the statistical properties of Chinese according to Claude Shannon’s information theory took place in various venues, challenging the conventional language ideologies. As linguists and engineers rallied to collaborate on the scriptal modernization project on the basis of the discursive space opened up by critiques of the 1977 Simplification Scheme, efforts to integrate Chinese script into computer data-storage formats ended up destabilizing the understanding of Chinese writing that conventionally takes “zi” as opposed to “ci” as its basic unit. The shifting foci of script reform discourses during the period demonstrate that the rise of information technology and resumed debates over script reform jointly instigated a retheorization of written Chinese.

"Abstract
Literary as well as linguistic scholars study dialect use in Victorian poetry and prose: the linguistic group generally examines the specifics of language use and tries to map its occurrence with a view to understanding its wider socio-linguistic significance. Literary-inclined research is interested in the aesthetic effects and affective power of local dialect – why a writer would choose to use it if they could as easily write in national English.
The 19th century was a rich period for dialect writers and linguists alike. Literary English dialect – that is, the use of local language in narrative, dramatic or lyrical textual contexts – proved adaptable and expressive for a wide range of Victorian writers from Wordsworth to Dickens, and could transcend geographical and sociological boundaries. Recent studies have attempted to make more mutually helpful connections between linguistic and literary research, taking account of the history of both while encouraging wider debate across the two disciplines and their numerous sub-categories. In the 21st century, diminishing
linguistic diversity is a cross-disciplinary concern for writers and researchers, as it relates to greater, global cultural shifts and even to biodiversity loss – losing the name for a thing might
result in losing the thing. This essay picks out recent studies that seek to address these connections between linguistic and literary interests, and that provide scope for further exploration, linking
research into Victorian attitudes to their cultural futures with our own."

This essay reviews the evidence concerning the Tabalian king Wasusarma and his father Tuwati, who appear in Neo-Assyrian and Urartian annals. The context for the removal of Wasusarma (Uassurme) from power by the Assyrian king is assumed to have lain in the events depicted in the large inscription of TOPADA. The historical and geographical import of this inscription is explored through a close reading of its historical portion, concluding that its background is set in a local struggle for power over north-western Cappadocia.

J.M. Tronson believed that the language of the word-list which he collected in 1856 on the Lower Amur, and published twice in 1859, was Nivkh. Among contemporary scholars, only Roman Jakobson noted that the language of Tronson’s word-list is not Nivkh, but Tungusic. Unfortunately, neither Jakobson nor other specialists have specified what language that might be. We confirm E.G. Ravenstein’s unnoticed assertion of 1861 that the language is Oroch and, from this new perspective, we offer a critical edition of Tronson’s pseudo-Nivkh word-list.

What do we mean when we use the category ‘indigenous knowledges’? What do we mean when we speak of ‘colonial sciences’? This Introduction briefly examines these questions in order to provide a context for the collection of articles presented in this issue on the making of the sciences in colonial South Asia. In doing so, it also addresses related questions: The translation of terms – does the Sanskrit word śāstra correspond to the English science? If not, what does each word mean? And the differences that arise when categories move across disciplines – development studies scholars use the term indigenous knowledges for the knowledge-forms of the original inhabitants of a territory; historians of South Asia and historians of science use it to refer to older forms of knowledge lost to colonial rule.

The contributors represent very different disciplines – anthropology, history, history of science and Indology; and bring a variety of methodological approaches to the questions they address. They cover a chronological span stretching from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, and address different subjects: the use of technical vocabulary in Sanskrit mathematical astronomy, astrology at universities in Banaras, the making of the Hindi Scientific Glossary, botanical knowledge-making in East India Company India, the philological practices of Vaidyas in Bengal, and Ayurvedic pedagogy in today’s Kerala. A common thread joining the essays appears in the role played by philology in practices as different as the naming of plants, the making of procedural medical knowledge in a gurukula, and the editing of Ayurvedic texts in the context of an expanding print culture in nineteenth-century Bengal.

The limitations of employing a Foucauldian framework for studying the colonial encounter are discussed and an alternative approach drawing on the work of the Bakhtin Circle is proposed. The origins of the Foucauldian approach in postcolonial studies is traced back to the emergence of Stalinist critiques of ‘bourgeois orientalism’ at the beginning of the Cold War, which proposed a dualistic model of closed discourses of ‘bourgeois’ and ‘Soviet’ orientalism. The Bakhtinian approach developed in opposition to Stalinist attempts to ‘monologise’ the critical approaches developed in the USSR, questioning the idea of closed discourses and stressing modes of engagement between different social groups and ideological positions. The second part of the article provides a case study of the emergence on Indo-European philology, which is often presented as a clear example of Western Orientalism. It is shown that this movement developed as a result of collaboration between European philologists and Indian high-caste pandits. It is shown that various agendas were pursued within philology, and that a number of different critical intersections emerged over time. It is suggested that a Bakhtinian approach, suitably revised and developed, provides a superior starting point for understanding these phenomena.

KEYWORDS: Foucault, Bakhtin, philology, orientalism, USSR

https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2018.1538226

Auritro Majumder's thoughtful response to the article is here: https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2018.1553976

The present article deals with the reflexes of Lat. scrībere in Germanic. It is proposed that the word was borrowed into Germanic at quite an early stage (1st century AD) as a result of contacts between West-Germanic-speaking populations and the Romans. Special stress is put on the importance of the Roman military in introducing the practice of writing among those that served in the army. Special attention is given to the North Germanic reflexes of Lat. scrībere in order to tentatively explain the morphological difference found in that branch of Germanic, where the verb is found both in the first class of strong verbs and in the second class of weak verbs. It is proposed that the former conjugation is primary, and that the rise of the latter is due to later developments such as lexical analogical processes and language-external causes. Furthermore, the present study confirms from a different perspective that English influence on writing is primary in the Old-West-Norse-speaking area. Finally, Schulte's (2015) proposal is re-read in the light of terminological evidence from England and Scandinavia.

During the sixteenth century the disputes between Catholics and Protestants became the battleground to determine and shape authentic Christianity and the Church. Humanism played a key role in this process conditioned by cultural and theological diversity, justifying doctrinal positions and legitimizing the existence of respective institutions with an appeal to history. Translations from church historical sources illustrate how they often derived from theological preconceptions. Starting with the ‘episcopacy issue’ opened initially by Luther and Calvin inter al., this article analyzes the translations of the Greek word episkopos in the Magdeburg Centuries, in Cesare Baronio’s Ecclesiastical Annals, in contemporary vernacular versions of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History, in J. C. Dietrich’s Lexicon and in some English Bibles. The material gathered and also compared with the position of the Council of Trent shows how these confessionally conditioned translations impacted on the scholarly world, and how they influenced church law with religio-political consequences, thereby
having a striking significance.

[FR] Le manuscrit Montpellier, BU Fac. Médecine, 157 contient une lettre d'évêque orientale tardo-antique, en traduction latine, dont le texte original grec ne semble pas conservé, et qui est étrangement restée inédite jusqu'à ce jour. Elle y apparaît en tête d'un manuel sur le comput pascal élaboré vers 840 par Florus de Lyon, la « collection De pascha », dont Montpellier 157, copié en 848 par un fidèle de Florus, Mannon de Saint-Oyen, est l'unique témoin conservé. Ainsi, ce recueil carolingien lyonnais serait la seule trace de l'existence de cette lettre — si saint Augustin n'avait pas lu, de manière certaine, ce Liber Timothei episcopi de pascha. En attendant l'édition et l'étude du texte, que je prépare actuellement avec Camille Gerzaguet, ce premier article entend donner des éléments de contexte : description et analyse du manuel de Florus, description matérielle et bio-bibliographie du témoin. On éclaire ainsi à la fois les raisons pour lesquelles Florus a sauvé ce texte rarissime d'une disparition complète, et les raisons pour lesquelles ce texte a échappé jusqu'ici à la vigilance des érudits modernes et des chercheurs contemporains.

[EN] MS. Montpellier, BU Fac. Médecine, 157 contains the Latin translation of an eastern late Antique bishop's letter, whose original Greek text appears to be lost; strangely enough, this text has remained totally unpublished to this day. It is the opening text of a handbook on Easter computus that was compiled around 840 by Florus of Lyons; Montpellier 157, which was copied in 848 by someone we know close to Florus, Manno of Saint-Oyen, is the only extant witness of this " De pascha collection ". This Carolingian Lyonnais miscellany would be the only trace of this letter's very existence — had not Saint Augustine himself drawn upon this Liber Timothei episcopi de pascha. In anticipation of the edition and analysis of this text that I am currently preparing with Camille Gerzaguet, this article explores its general context: a description and analysis of Florus' handbook, as well as a material description and a bio-bibliography of the unique witness. These elements shed light on the reasons why Florus saved this most rare text from oblivion, as well as the reasons why the text escaped, until now, the vigilance of modern and contemporary scholars.

Dans la lignée des travaux d’Anthony Grafton, l’histoire de la philologie s’est surtout focalisée, dans les dernières décennies, sur le développement des savoir faire érudits et sur la constitution des communautés savantes. Cet article propose déplacer le regard de l’analyse des logiques propres de la pratique philologique vers l’étude des conditions sociales et politiques dans lesquelles se sont peu à peu établies ces compétences.  Au travers de l’examen de la carrière et des publications d’André Dacier, on s’interroge en particulier ici sur la manière dont la recherche et l’obtention du patronage royal a pu infléchir les manières de faire des savants de l’époque moderne. L’étude examine d’abord comment André Dacier s’est efforcé de créer une philologie à l’usage du monde, avant d’envisager dans un second temps comment sa manière de traduire, de commenter et de publier les textes anciens s’est modifiée, dans la dernière partie de sa carrière, lorsqu’il œuvrait dans la protection royale.

Was the feud indeed 'quite central to Anglo-Saxon political society', as has been maintained by Paul Hyams and other modern historians? Or should such claims be viewed with skepticism? And is the concept of 'the sacred duty and right of blood vengeance' that has been attributed to the early Germanic-speaking peoples rooted in nineteenth-century concepts of the past, ones that now deserve to be superseded?

This essay discusses these questions with special reference to the Old English word 'faehth', which normally means 'act of violence' rather than 'feud', and with additional attention to Richard Fletcher's book 'Bloodfeud', to the situations of intergroup hostility depicted in 'Beowulf', and to the social situation in medieval Iceland, which does not admit of easy comparisons with that in Anglo-Saxon England. I conclude that while talk of the 'feud' tends to be beside the point, the people of Anglo-Saxon England had strong investments in institutions of justice whereby acts of violence called for recompense within the parameters of customary law.

The linguistic ideas of the 16th-century French grammarian Petrus Antesignanus have been largely neglected up till now. In the present paper, I aim to partially repair this research lacuna within the context of the notion of “dialect”. After some short introductory notes on Antesignanus’ life and works, I discuss his conception of dialect, which is expounded in his 1554 scholia on Nicolaus Clenardus’ Greek grammar. This analysis occurs both on a general level and specifically with regard to the Ancient Greek situation. I include in this discussion a number of considerations that contextualize the views of Antesignanus. Henricus Stephanus’ attack on Antesignanus’ assertions figures as a case study in this regard.

The article discusses the cultures of authority during the long 12th century. The author defines the long 12th century as one that extends from after the Great Schism of 1054 to the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The author mentions "auctoritas," which means "authority" as a word that belongs to the lasting coinage of Latin language. The term is paired with other words such as "potestas" and "imperium" during the old times until the Middle Ages.

In this article, I outline a logic of design of a system as a specific kind of conceptual logic of the design of the model of a system, that is, the blueprint that provides information about the system to be created. In section two, I introduce the method of levels of abstraction as a modelling tool borrowed from computer science. In section three, I use this method to clarify two main conceptual logics of information (i.e., modelling systems) inherited from modernity: Kant's transcen-dental logic of conditions of possibility of a system, and Hegel's dialectical logic of conditions of in/stability of a system. Both conceptual logics of information analyse structural properties of given systems. Strictly speaking, neither is a conceptual logic of information about (or modelling) the conditions of feasibility of a system, that is, neither is a logic of information as a logic of design. So, in section four, I outline this third conceptual logic of information and then interpret the conceptual logic of design as a logic of requirements, by introducing the relation of " suffici-entisation ". In the conclusion, I argue that the logic of requirements is exactly what we need in order to make sense of, and buttress, a constructionist (poietic) approach to knowledge.

Une des critiques d’Antoine Meillet, un des premiers à faire un CR du CLG, au travail d’édition de Bally et Sechehaye portait sur la forme donnée au texte. Je présente une recherche à propos du style de Saussure dans le cadre de la philologie d’auteur. Ma recherche porterait donc sur les variantes de Saussure dans les manuscrits de linguistique générale en partant de De l’essence double du langage et d’autres exemples tirés des brouillons d’articles et des notes préparatoires pour les cours. Je montrerai d’une part le rôle de l’écriture, en tant qu’instrument de recherche, chez Saussure, d’autre part j’essaie d’émettre une hypothèse sur la convergence entre le style et l’écriture de recherche. Je voudrais montrer la continuité et le chiffre stylistique des textes et manuscrits de Saussure. Enfin, je tenterai de conjuguer la spécificité des variantes relevées avec les indications de Saussure trouvées dans d’autres manuscrites dédiées plus particulièrement au style et à l’écriture.

One of the critical remarks of Antoine Meillet, one of the first to do a review of the CLG during the editorial work of the edition of Bally and Sechehaye, concerned the form of the text. I'm presenting a research on the style of Saussure in the framework of the philology of the author. My research will be concentrated on the variations of Saussure in the manuscripts of the Courses of General Linguistics, starting from The double Essence of Language and other examples from drafts of articles and preparatory work of lectures. On one hand I will stretch on the importance of writing as a research tool of Saussure, on the other hand I will try to elaborate a hypothesis on the convergence between style and writing of his research. I would like to show the continuity of the style in the manuscripts of Saussure. Finally, I’ll try to show the connections between the analyses of variations with the affirmations of Saussure about the style and the art of writing.