Historiographia Linguistica - Volume 47, Issue 1, 2020

Résumé

Dans le domaine sémitique occidental, l’hébreu, le syriaque et l’arabe, la plus jeune des langues de ce groupe, partagent des termes qui se présentent comme morphophonologiquement semblables et homonymes: respectivement ʿillah, ʿelltā et ʿilla. Ce dernier, issu du précédent, possède deux significations en arabe, “maladie” d’une part et “cause” d’autre part. Ce serait également le cas du terme grec aitía qui serait l’équivalent de ces termes sémitiques. Il est toutefois difficile de relier ces deux significations l’une à l’autre, et l’explication classique pour l’arabe est de poser que la seconde dériverait de la première. Cette étude s’attache à montrer que, contrairement à ce que certains avancent, non seulement le terme grec, mais également ses équivalents syriaque et hébreu ne possèdent que le sens de “cause”. Elle propose par ailleurs de voir dans les termes syriaque et hébreu non pas les descendants d’un proto-sémitique commun (rien de comparable n’étant à signaler en akkadien), mais le fruit vraisemblable d’un emprunt fait au bas latin: là, le verbe īnfĕrō, “causer”, y a pour dérivés nominaux des termes en illāt-. En conséquence, ce n’est pas tant le sens de “cause” qu’il s’agirait d’expliquer en arabe, mais bien plutôt celui de “maladie”, et, contrairement à ce qui a été avancé, c’est certainement le sens de “cause” qui est premier et fondamental et non celui de “maladie”, expliquant alors certainement son emploi en grammaire arabe.

Summary

Petrarch’s metalinguistic observations are scattered throughout his work, rare and for the most part elliptical. The present article closely examines Petrarch’s statements about language to arrive at an alternative interpretation to that of previous scholarship. We analyse the ideas, attitudes and beliefs that inform Petrarch’s conception of the difference between Latin and the vernacular languages. The first section provides a critique of the now prevailing view on Petrarch’s metalinguistic thinking. Mirko Tavoni and Silvia Rizzo hypothesize that Petrarch ‘was not conscious of being bilingual’, since he considered Latin and vernaculars as different stylistic varieties of one and the same language. In the remaining two sections we propose an alternative account. Comparing statements made by contemporaries of Petrarch and investigating their origin and rationale, we suggest that Petrarch’s conception and practice cannot be accounted for within a modern perspective of national language and are better captured by the notion of diglossia, in which two linguistic varieties are delimited by the contexts of their use.

Summary

Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Über die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Java can be seen as the first comparative grammar of non-Indo-European languages. While Humboldt’s practice of collecting and re-assembling linguistic information has been documented extensively in the Berlin Academy edition of his Schriften zur Sprachwissenschaft, this article puts his work in perspective by tracing it back to its sources and treating it as part of a wider parallel process of expanding the comparative view. In three sections, this article discusses (1) the research agendas of the three British colonial scholars upon whose works Humboldt drew for Malayan languages; (2) to which extent his Polynesian language material was ‘rawer’ than these compendia; and (3) how he reworked this material into a comparative Malayo-Polynesian grammar. Finally, a comparison is drawn with the work of his assistant and continuator Eduard Buschmann, and with Horatio Hale’s slightly later survey of the languages of the Pacific.

Summary

This article discusses and analyses the 1970 election for President of the Linguistic Society of America. In that year, Dwight Bolinger challenged the official candidate Martin Joos and defeated him easily. We see that it was mainly personal and generational factors, rather than intellectual ones, that led to Bolinger’s victory.

This article reviews Bibliographie linguistique de l’année 2016 et complément des années précédentes€ 549,00$ 623,00