What can the languages spoken today tell us about the history of their speakers? This question is crucial in insular Southeast Asia and New Guinea, where thousands of languages are spoken, but written historical records and archaeological evidence is yet lacking in most regions. While the region has a long history of contact through trade, marriage exchanges, and cultural-political dominance, d…
This volume offers the critical edition and an English translation of the oldest translation of the Pentateuch into Western Karaim copied in 1720 by Simcha ben Chananel (died 1723). The manuscript was compared against several other Karaim translations of the Torah as well as with the standard text of the Hebrew Bible. The author provides a description of the manuscript’s language and an outli…
This open access book aims to provide an explanatory account for the phenomenon of absent external arguments in Mandarin Chinese. It starts from the observation that although expletivizing an agent is considered impossible cross-linguistically, it is possible in Mandarin. To account for this exceptional behavior, it proposes the M parameter, which suggests that English and Chinese differ in whe…
How can we explain metrical irregularities in Homeric phrases like ἀνδροτῆτα καὶ ἥβην? What do such phrases tell us about the antiquity of the epic tradition? And how did doublet forms such as τέτρατος beside τέταρτος originate? In this book, you will find the first systematic and complete account of the syllabic liquids in Ancient Greek. It provides an up-t…
The Politics of Written Language in the Arab World connects the fascinating field of contemporary written Arabic with the central sociolinguistic notions of language ideology and diglossia. Focusing on Egypt and Morocco, the authors combine large-scale survey data on language attitudes with in-depth analyses of actual language usage and explicit (and implicit) language ideology. They show that …
This monograph is a contribution to the documentation of the linguistic situation of the Kinnaur district in Himachal Pradesh (Indian Himalayas) which has been so far almost undescribed. The Sino-Tibetan languages Kinnauri and Navakat and the Indo-Aryan language Kinnauri Pahari, all spoken in Kinnaur, are described both individually and as parts of a multifaceted linguistic ecology that extends…
This book contains a detailed grammatical description of Jibbali (or Shahri), an unwritten Semitic language spoken in the Dhofar region of Oman, along with seventy texts. This is the first ever comprehensive grammar of Jibbali, and the first collection of texts published in over a hundred years. Topics in phonology, all aspects of morphology, and a variety of syntactic features are covered. The…
Since the translation of the Septuagint in the 3rd century BCE, scholars have attempted to identify the stones that populate the biblical text. This study rejects the long-standing reliance on ancient translations for identifying biblical stones. Despite the evident contradictions and historical inconsistencies, scholars traditionally presumed these translations to be reliable. By departing fro…
Dieses Open Access-Buch bietet eine historisch ausgerichtete Untersuchung juristisch-notarieller Dokumente aus Neu-Spanien an der Schnittstelle zwischen romanistischer Textlinguistik und Translationswissenschaft. Konkret wird ein umfassendes Korpus aus Texten der indigenen Selbstverwaltung und Rechtsprechung analysiert, die in einer peripheren Region des kolonialen Mexiko zwischen dem 17. und 1…
Ausgangspunkt dieses Konferenzbands im Open Access ist die Frage nach den Bedingungen, die dafür verantwortlich zeichnen, dass überhaupt und in welcher Form in der Frühen Neuzeit übersetzt wird. Anders formuliert geht es um die grundsätzliche Frage danach, warum bestimmte Texte, Bilder, Zeichenkomplexe etc. eine Übersetzung erfahren, während andere unübersetzt bleiben (müssen). Welche …