Grammar Wars: Language as Cultural Battlefield in 17th and 18th Century England

Grammar Wars: Language as Cultural Battlefield in 17th and 18th Century England PDF

Author: Linda C Mitchell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-20

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1351807862

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This title was first published in 2001: Although 17th- and 18th-century English language theorists claimed to be correcting errors in grammar and preserving the language from corruption, this new study demonstrates how grammar served as an important cultural battlefield where social issues were contested. Author Linda C. Mitchell situates early modern linguistic discussions, long thought to be of little interest, in their larger cultural and social setting to show the startling degree to which grammar affected, and was affected by, such factors as class and gender. In her examination of the controversies that surrounded the teaching and study of grammar in this period, Mitchell looks especially at changing definitions and standardization of "grammar", how and to whom it was taught, and how grammar marked the social position of marginal groups. Her comprehensive study of the contexts in which grammar was intended or thought to function is based on her analysis of the ancillary materials - prefaces, introductions, forewords, statements of intent, organization of materials, surrounding materials, and manifestos of pedagogy, philosophy, and social or political goals - of more than 300 grammar texts of the time. The book is intended as a landmark study of an important movement in the foundation of the modern world.

The New Philosophy and Universal Languages in Seventeenth-century England

The New Philosophy and Universal Languages in Seventeenth-century England PDF

Author: Robert E. Stillman

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780838753101

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That saving form of knowledge, as it develops in the lines of linguistic thought that extend from Bacon's Instauration to Wilkins's Philosophical Language, is both a product of and one potent agent in producing the emerging, scientistically designed, modern state.

Music and the Origins of Language

Music and the Origins of Language PDF

Author: Downing A. Thomas

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1995-06-15

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 0521473071

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This study analyses reflections on music and considers ways in which it facilitates links between language and meaning.

Virtual Voyages

Virtual Voyages PDF

Author: Paul Longley Arthur

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0857284088

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'Virtual Voyages' is a fascinating account of the European discovery of the elusive 'great south land' told through the literature of 'imaginary voyages'. Written at the height of the era of European maritime exploration, these bizarre and captivating tales, with their wildly imaginative visions of antipodean inversion and strangeness, reveal a hidden history of attitudes to colonization. By exposing the relationship between myth and reality in the antipodes, this book casts new light on the power of fiction to influence history. In the post-colonial studies field, books about travel writing and empire have tended to focus on the high period of nineteenth-century imperialism and on the colonial settings of Africa and India. This book offers a fresh perspective by focussing on the eighteenth century, and referring to the geographical region of Australia and the Pacific, which has had far less attention. The book also breaks new ground by being the first to approach the genre of the imaginary voyage from a post-colonial perspective. In addition to the new insights into European colonialism that it offers, the book illustrates many broader themes in eighteenth-century history and thought. These include connections between the rise of science and modern imperialism, the development of narrative history and fiction and the influence of romanticism, the evolution of the early novel in Britain and France, and the role of mythology in the development of national identity.

The Pretended Asian

The Pretended Asian PDF

Author: Michael Keevak

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9780814331989

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The Pretended Asian also traces Psalmanazar's later career as a Grub Street hack writer and how his lifelong refusal to reveal his real identity - even after Europeans stopped believing he was a native of Formosa - may have rendered Psalmanazar a permanent outsider."--BOOK JACKET.

Western Histories of Linguistic Thought

Western Histories of Linguistic Thought PDF

Author: E.F.K. Koerner

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1978-01-01

Total Pages: 125

ISBN-13: 9027281327

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The present bibliography suggests that there has been a constant flow of publications which survey the discipline of linguistics in its various stages of development. It attempts to offer a comprehensive coverage of general accounts of the history of linguistic thought in the western world over the last 150 years.

Sweden in the Eighteenth-Century World

Sweden in the Eighteenth-Century World PDF

Author: Göran Rydén

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-09

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 1317047419

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Eighteenth-century Sweden was deeply involved in the process of globalisation: ships leaving Sweden’s central ports exported bar iron that would drive the Industrial Revolution, whilst arriving ships would bring not only exotic goods and commodities to Swedish consumers, but also new ideas and cultural practices with them. At the same time, Sweden was an agricultural country to a large extent governed by self-subsistence, and - for most - wealth was created within this structure. This volume brings together a group of scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds who seek to present a more nuanced and elaborated picture of the Swedish cosmopolitan eighteenth century. Together they paint a picture of Sweden that is more like the one eighteenth-century intellectuals imagined, and help to situate Sweden in histories of cosmopolitanism of the wider world.

Imaginary Languages

Imaginary Languages PDF

Author: Marina Yaguello

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2023-09-19

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0262547155

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An exploration of the practice of inventing languages, from speaking in tongues to utopian schemes of universality to the discoveries of modern linguistics. In Imaginary Languages, Marina Yaguello explores the history and practice of inventing languages, from religious speaking in tongues to politically utopian schemes of universality to the discoveries of modern linguistics. She looks for imagined languages that are autonomous systems, complete unto themselves and meant for communal use; imaginary, and therefore unlike both natural languages and historically attested languages; and products of an individual effort to lay hold of language. Inventors of languages, Yaguello writes, are madly in love: they love an object that belongs to them only to the extent that they also share it with a community. Yaguello investigates the sources of imaginary languages, in myths, dreams, and utopias. She takes readers on a tour of languages invented in literature from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, including that in More’s Utopia, Leibniz’s “algebra of thought,” and Bulwer-Lytton’s linguistic fiction. She examines the linguistic fantasies (or madness) of Georgian linguist Nikolai Marr and Swiss medium Hélène Smith; and considers the quest for the true philosophical language. Yaguello finds two abiding (and somewhat contradictory) forces: the diversity of linguistic experience, which stands opposed to unifying endeavors, and, on the other hand, features shared by all languages (natural or not) and their users, which justifies the universalist hypothesis. Recent years have seen something of a boom in invented languages, whether artificial languages meant to facilitate international communication or imagined languages constructed as part of science fiction worlds. In Imaginary Languages (an updated and expanded version of the earlier Les Fous du langage, published in English as Lunatic Lovers of Language), Yaguello shows that the invention of language is above all a passionate, dizzying labor of love.

The Study of Language in 17th-Century England

The Study of Language in 17th-Century England PDF

Author: Vivian Salmon

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1988-01-01

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 9027286116

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This volume brings together a number of papers by Vivian Salmon, previously published in various journals and collections that are unfamiliar, and perhaps even inaccessible, to historians of the study of language. The central theme of the volume is the study of language in England in the 17th century. Papers in the first section treat aspects of the history of language teaching. The second section consists of three articles on the history of grammatical theory. The papers in the third and final section deal with the search for the ‘universal language’.