The birth of new languages in contemporary Europe

The birth of a language is a historical process, which develops through almost six stages corresponding to six main properties (genetic distance, geographical isolation, adoption of a writing system, elaboration of a literary koine, national consciousness, official status), which are specific to Western civilization and limited to our concern, i.e. the languages in contemporary Europe. The two last properties are the most important and conclusive in achieving the full status of language in contrast with dialect, speech, idiom, vernacular and so on. Consequently, in this perspective the birth of a language can be stated when its use is felt as a token of national identity and its official status is recognized by politic power. The history of some interesting cases during the 20th century, such as Luxemburgish, Feroese and Macedonian will throw a light on the possible future scenario of the languages of the Former Yugoslavia. Other disputed, although not so dramatic cases, like Sardinian, Aranese, Moldavian and Ruthenian, are dealt with together with recurrent topics on minority languages. The conclusion is that, unlike the worldwide tendency, the number of languages will probably increase within the greater European Union in the course of the 21st century.     

New concepts and words in post-Soviet Russia

The research of Anglicisms in European languages is a part of the project supervised by the scholars from the University of Cologne. The adaptation of loan words in the Russian language possesses some social and cultural peculiarities in contrast to other European countries due to the drastic political changes and dynamic introduction of the market economy. The investigation is based on the linguistic and social analysis of Anglicisms, which were imported into Russian in the late 90-s and the beginning of the new millennium. The research focus is concentrated on the study of the most frequent terms circulating on the pages of professional (literary, business, political) and other mass media sources. Three groups of the latest borrowings are discussed: neutral terms, which have proved to be rather stable within 20 years; expressive fashionable neologisms with the restricted sphere of application and evaluative words revealing either Western cultural values or socially marked concepts, typical of post-socialism.     

Zombie Linguistics: Experts,Endangered Languages and the Curse of Undead Voices

The alarming projection that up to ninety per cent of the world's languages will become extinct by the end of this century has prompted a new sense of urgency among linguists and other language scholars to rush out and record the last utterances from the last speakers of ‘endangered languages’. As the last speaker utters her/his last words, the ‘expert’ is there to record this important moment and preserve it for all time. Among the benefits from such preservation efforts is the ability to play back the recordings at any time in any place. In popular media this process is described as ‘saving the language’ through recording and documentation. Unfortunately, these recordings are not living voices. Rather, they are zombie voices—undead voices that are disembodied and techno-mechanized. They are cursed with being neither dead nor alive. They become artefacts of technological interventions, as well as expert valorisations of linguistic codes. Expert rhetoric compounds the problem by the use of metaphoric frames such as death, endangerment and extinction. Metaphors not only frame discourses of language endangerment, but they also frame and influence actions and interventions. This essay critically evaluates the metaphors used by language experts to understand the unintended consequences for community members who are actively revitalising and reclaiming their languages. The essay also identifies key strategies used by community language activists to ignore existing metaphors, while creating new metaphors to potentiate new solutions to language death to promote emergent vitalities.     

Experimental history and Herman Boerhaave’s chemistry of plants

In the early eighteenth century, chemistry became the main academic locus where, in Francis Bacon’s words, Experimenta lucifera were performed alongside Experimenta fructifera and where natural philosophy was coupled with natural history and ‘experimental history’ in the Baconian and Boyleian sense of an inventory and exploration of the extant operations of the arts and crafts. The Dutch social and political system and the institutional setting of the university of Leiden endorsed this empiricist, utilitarian orientation toward the sciences, which was forcefully propagated by one of the university’s most famous representatives in the first half of the eighteenth century, the professor of medicine, botany and chemistry Herman Boerhaave. Recent historical investigations on Boerhaave’s chemistry have provided important insights into Boerhaave’s religious background, his theoretical and philosophical goals, and his pedagogical agenda. But comparatively little attention has been paid to the chemical experiments presented in Boerhaave’s famous chemical textbook, the Elementa chemiae, and to the question of how these experiments relate not only to experimental philosophy but also to experimental history and natural history, and to contemporary utilitarianism. I argue in this essay that Boerhaave shared a strong commitment to Baconian utilitarianism and empiricism with many other European chemists around the middle of the eighteenth century, in particular to what Bacon designated ‘experimental history’ and I will provide evidence for this claim through a careful analysis of Boerhaave’s plant-chemical experiments presented in the Elementa chemiae.     

Suggesting a new European language policy

Conflict is the most intriguing aspect of contact linguistics. Throughout history ever since the Tower of Babel was left unfinished, contacts between speakers of different languages have unavoidably resulted in conflicts between speakers of those languages. Without any doubt, the European Union (EU)--above all after the decision to enlarge the community--has accepted the multidisciplinary symbolic function of language and culture as a basis for European political unification. Accordingly, European Union policy makers have had to analyze conflicts caused by monolingualism and multilingualism, all aspects of contact linguistics. Can these conflicts be solved, minimized or neutralized by strategies of language planning, language policies and language politics? Initial results of European language policy strategies permit at least a cautious measure of optimism and open broad perspectives for the future of a New Multilingualism which will be discussed in our contribution.     

The Past Ubiquity and Environment of the Lost Earth Buildings of Scotland

This paper investigates the once ubiquitous vernacular earth-built structures of Scotland and how perceptions of such buildings were shaped and developed through periods of intense cultural and environmental change. We focus upon the past exploitation of traditional resources to construct vernacular architectures and on changes in the perception of the resultant buildings. Historic earth-built structures are today deeply hidden within the landscapes of Scotland, although they were once a common feature of both urban and rural settlements. Whilst the eighteenth and nineteenth century period of Improvement – during which many of these structures were destroyed, repurposed, or left to decay – has received extensive attention by historians, there exists no previous serious study of the human and environmental dimensions. Through analysis of the material aspects of landscape resource use and analysis of the historical perceptions of such use, we emphasize the national significance of this undervalued aspect of Scotland’s built and cultural heritage, increasingly at risk of being lost completely, highlighting the prior ubiquity of mudwall structures.     

Language shift, bilingualism and the future of Britain's Celtic languages

'Language shift' is the process whereby members of a community in which more than one language is spoken abandon their original vernacular language in favour of another. The historical shifts to English by Celtic language speakers of Britain and Ireland are particularly well-studied examples for which good census data exist for the most recent 100-120 years in many areas where Celtic languages were once the prevailing vernaculars. We model the dynamics of language shift as a competition process in which the numbers of speakers of each language (both monolingual and bilingual) vary as a function both of internal recruitment (as the net outcome of birth, death, immigration and emigration rates of native speakers), and of gains and losses owing to language shift. We examine two models: a basic model in which bilingualism is simply the transitional state for households moving between alternative monolingual states, and a diglossia model in which there is an additional demand for the endangered language as the preferred medium of communication in some restricted sociolinguistic domain, superimposed on the basic shift dynamics. Fitting our models to census data, we successfully reproduce the demographic trajectories of both languages over the past century. We estimate the rates of recruitment of new Scottish Gaelic speakers that would be required each year (for instance, through school education) to counteract the 'natural wastage' as households with one or more Gaelic speakers fail to transmit the language to the next generation informally, for different rates of loss during informal intergenerational transmission.     

The Role of Language in Nation-Building within the European Union

Europe is home to a vast array of indigenous languages, not to mention numerous immigrant languages. European Union (EU) acknowledgement of “national” languages as official languages results in a privileged status for these languages vis-à-vis the minority languages with which they cohabit. This support prevents hegemony by a single language such as English, yet the EU simultaneously undermines these national languages domestically by promoting their minority language competitors. This paradox can only be understood by examining the developing model for European identity whereby identity is viewed as variable and multi-faceted, rooted in multilingual facility and the absence of a single, monolithic source of identity. If the project of creating a European identity is viewed as nation-building,it is central to consider how the issue of language diversity is addressed at the European level. The paper begins by discussing the concept of national identity and the central role that language plays in its determination, as well as what modern conceptions of language planning bring to this process. After exploring the European language terrain, the paper considers whether the EU can even be said to have a language policy. The discussion focuses on multilingual education programs, the treatment of minority languages, and the issue of languages spoken by immigrant populations. Having presented these conceptual tools and policy surveys, an analytical framework is introduced that situates the nation-building process in relation to the creation of a common European identity.     

Estimating prehistoric American Indian population size for united states area: Implications of the nineteenth century population decline and nadir

Implications of a revised United States American Indian nadir population and the pattern of decline leading to it are examined. Substituting the new nadir for that used by Dobyns (1966) lowers by several million his estimates of Indian population for the United States (and Canada) area. These estimates then become more compatible with ones currently being suggested by other scholars. The nineteenth century decline leading to this nadir is found to be remarkably linear. Assuming linearity in decline from initial European contact through the eighteenth century, an aboriginal population estimate of 1,845,183 for the United States area may be extrapolated, along with estimates for intervening years. The nineteenth century decline is then graphed with the data extrapolated to 1492. The resulting pattern of population decline is quite different from the ones suggested by Mooney (1928) and Dobyns (1966).     

Modeling the Emergence of Contact Languages

Contact languages are born out of the non-trivial interaction of two (or more) parent languages. Nowadays, the enhanced possibility of mobility and communication allows for a strong mixing of languages and cultures, thus raising the issue of whether there are any pure languages or cultures that are unaffected by contact with others. As with bacteria or viruses in biological evolution, the evolution of languages is marked by horizontal transmission; but to date no reliable quantitative tools to investigate these phenomena have been available. An interesting and well documented example of contact language is the emergence of creole languages, which originated in the contacts of European colonists and slaves during the 17th and 18th centuries in exogenous plantation colonies of especially the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Here, we focus on the emergence of creole languages to demonstrate a dynamical process that mimics the process of creole formation in American and Caribbean plantation ecologies. Inspired by the Naming Game (NG), our modeling scheme incorporates demographic information about the colonial population in the framework of a non-trivial interaction network including three populations: Europeans, Mulattos/Creoles, and Bozal slaves. We show how this sole information makes it possible to discriminate territories that produced modern creoles from those that did not, with a surprising accuracy. The generality of our approach provides valuable insights for further studies on the emergence of languages in contact ecologies as well as to test specific hypotheses about the peopling and the population structures of the relevant territories. We submit that these tools could be relevant to addressing problems related to contact phenomena in many cultural domains: e.g., emergence of dialects, language competition and hybridization, globalization phenomena.     

A Brief History of the Changing Occupations and Demographics of Coleopterists from the 18th Through the 20th Century

Systematic entomology flourished as a branch of Natural History from the 1750s to the end of the nineteenth century. During this interval, the “era of Heroic Entomology,” the majority of workers in the field were dedicated amateurs. This article traces the demographic and occupational shifts in entomology through this 150-year interval and into the early twentieth century. The survey is based on entomologists who studied beetles (Coleoptera), and who named sufficient numbers of species to have their own names abbreviated by subsequent taxonomists. In the eighteenth century, 27 entomologists achieved this level of prominence, of whom 37% were academics, 19% were doctors, 11% had private incomes, 19% were clergymen, and 8% were government officials. Many of those with private incomes were members of the European aristocracy, and all but one were European men. The nineteenth century list included 192 entomologists, of whom 17% were academics, 16% were museum curators, 2% were school teachers, 15% were doctors, 6% were military men, 7% were merchants, 2% were government entomologists, 6% had private incomes, 5% were clergymen, 5% were government officials, and 4% were lawyers. The demographics of entomology shifted dramatically in the nineteenth century. Whereas many of the noteworthy entomologists of the eighteenth century were German, Swedish, or French, in the nineteenth century, many more European countries are represented, and almost one-fifth of the noteworthy entomologists were from the United States. The nineteenth century list, like the eighteenth century list, contains no women. By the twentieth century, 63% of 178 noteworthy systematic entomologists were paid professionals, teaching entomology courses in universities, or studying insect taxonomy in museums and government-sponsored laboratories. Only one person on the twentieth century list had a private income, but women (ten individuals) were included on the list for the first time.     

How evolution generates complexity without design: language as an instructional metaphor

One of the major stumbling blocks to understanding evolution is the difficulty in reconciling the emergence of complexity with the apparently undirected forces that drive evolutionary processes. This difficulty was originally framed as the "Watch and Watchmaker" argument and more recently revived by proponents of "intelligent design." Undergraduates in particular often attribute purpose and forethought as the driving force behind biological phenomena, and have difficulty understanding evolutionary processes. To demonstrate that complexity can arise solely through mutations that fix in populations via natural selection or drift, we can use analogies where processes can be observed across short time frames and where the key data are accessible to those without specialized biological knowledge. The evolution of language provides such an example. Processes of natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, acquisition of new functions, punctuated equilibria, and lateral gene transfer can be illustrated using examples of changing spellings, neologism, and acquisition of words from other languages. The examples presented in this article are readily accessible, and demonstrate to students that languages have dynamically increased in complexity, simply driven by the usage patterns of their speakers.     

The astrological roots of mesmerism

Franz Anton Mesmer’s 1766 thesis on the influence of the planets on the human body, in which he first publicly presented his account of the harmonic forces at work in the microcosm, was substantially copied from the London physician Richard Mead’s early eighteenth century tract on solar and lunar effects on the body. The relation between the two texts poses intriguing problems for the historiography of medical astrology: Mesmer’s use of Mead has been taken as a sign of the Vienna physician’s enlightened modernity while Mead’s use of astro-meteorology has been seen as evidence of the survival of antiquated astral medicine in the eighteenth century.Two aspects of this problem are discussed. First, French critics of mesmerism in the 1780s found precedents for animal magnetism in the work of Paracelsus, Fludd and other early modern writers; in so doing, they began to develop a sophisticated history for astrology and astro-meteorology.Second, the close relations between astro-meteorology and Mead’s project illustrate how the environmental medical programmes emerged. The making of a history for astrology accompanied the construction of various models of the relation between occult knowledge and its contexts in the enlightenment.     

Languages Support Efficient Communication about the Environment: Words for Snow Revisited

The claim that Eskimo languages have words for different types of snow is well-known among the public, but has been greatly exaggerated through popularization and is therefore viewed with skepticism by many scholars of language. Despite the prominence of this claim, to our knowledge the line of reasoning behind it has not been tested broadly across languages. Here, we note that this reasoning is a special case of the more general view that language is shaped by the need for efficient communication, and we empirically test a variant of it against multiple sources of data, including library reference works, Twitter, and large digital collections of linguistic and meteorological data. Consistent with the hypothesis of efficient communication, we find that languages that use the same linguistic form for snow and ice tend to be spoken in warmer climates, and that this association appears to be mediated by lower communicative need to talk about snow and ice. Our results confirm that variation in semantic categories across languages may be traceable in part to local communicative needs. They suggest moreover that despite its awkward history, the topic of “words for snow” may play a useful role as an accessible instance of the principle that language supports efficient communication.     

How do we use language? Shared patterns in the frequency of word use across 17 world languages

We present data from 17 languages on the frequency with which a common set of words is used in everyday language. The languages are drawn from six language families representing 65 per cent of the world's 7000 languages. Our data were collected from linguistic corpora that record frequencies of use for the 200 meanings in the widely used Swadesh fundamental vocabulary. Our interest is to assess evidence for shared patterns of language use around the world, and for the relationship of language use to rates of lexical replacement, defined as the replacement of a word by a new unrelated or non-cognate word. Frequencies of use for words in the Swadesh list range from just a few per million words of speech to 191 000 or more. The average inter-correlation among languages in the frequency of use across the 200 words is 0.73 (p < 0.0001). The first principal component of these data accounts for 70 per cent of the variance in frequency of use. Elsewhere, we have shown that frequently used words in the Indo-European languages tend to be more conserved, and that this relationship holds separately for different parts of speech. A regression model combining the principal factor loadings derived from the worldwide sample along with their part of speech predicts 46 per cent of the variance in the rates of lexical replacement in the Indo-European languages. This suggests that Indo-European lexical replacement rates might be broadly representative of worldwide rates of change. Evidence for this speculation comes from using the same factor loadings and part-of-speech categories to predict a word's position in a list of 110 words ranked from slowest to most rapidly evolving among 14 of the world's language families. This regression model accounts for 30 per cent of the variance. Our results point to a remarkable regularity in the way that human speakers use language, and hint that the words for a shared set of meanings have been slowly evolving and others more rapidly evolving throughout human history.     

Rank Diversity of Languages: Generic Behavior in Computational Linguistics

Statistical studies of languages have focused on the rank-frequency distribution of words. Instead, we introduce here a measure of how word ranks change in time and call this distribution rank diversity. We calculate this diversity for books published in six European languages since 1800, and find that it follows a universal lognormal distribution. Based on the mean and standard deviation associated with the lognormal distribution, we define three different word regimes of languages: “heads” consist of words which almost do not change their rank in time, “bodies” are words of general use, while “tails” are comprised by context-specific words and vary their rank considerably in time. The heads and bodies reflect the size of language cores identified by linguists for basic communication. We propose a Gaussian random walk model which reproduces the rank variation of words in time and thus the diversity. Rank diversity of words can be understood as the result of random variations in rank, where the size of the variation depends on the rank itself. We find that the core size is similar for all languages studied.     

Storytelling, statistics and hereditary thought: the narrative support of early statistics

This paper's main contention is that some basically methodological developments in science which are apparently distant and unrelated can be seen as part of a sequential story. Focusing on general inferential and epistemological matters, the paper links occurrences separated by both in time and space, by formal and representational issues rather than social or disciplinary links. It focuses on a few limited aspects of several cognitive practices in medical and biological contexts separated by geography, disciplines and decades, but connected by long term transdisciplinary representational and inferential structures and constraints. The paper intends to show a given set of knowledge claims based on organizing statistically empirical data can be seen to have been underpinned by a previous, more familiar, and probably more natural, narrative handling of similar evidence. To achieve that this paper moves from medicine in France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth century in England among gentleman naturalists, following its subject: the shift from narrative depiction of hereditary transmission of physical peculiarities to posterior statistical articulations of the same phenomena. Some early defenders of heredity as an important (if not the most important) causal presence in the understanding of life adopted singular narratives, in the form of case stories from medical and natural history traditions, to flesh out a special kind of causality peculiar to heredity. This work tries to reconstruct historically the rationale that drove the use of such narratives. It then shows that when this rationale was methodologically challenged, its basic narrative and probabilistic underpinings were transferred to the statistical quantificational tools that took their place.     

Chasing the dragon: the cultural metamorphosis of opium in the United States, 1825-1935

Many things to many people, opium has played a role in the emergence of several power bases in the United States. In turn, these bases of power have shaped what opium is for the rest of us. Allopathic medicine brought opium and its derivatives under its control around the turn of the century, promulgating "addiction theory" and addiction clinics as part of its rise to preeminence among rival forms of medicine. Opium also played a role in the U.S.'s international economic and imperialistic ascendance. When politicians began to deploy a new discourse on opium early in this century, they were able to appropriate medical rhetoric. As the politics of opium heated up, some doctors were able to exploit the emerging politically inspired discourse to generate a subtly different medical knowledge of opiates and addiction while establishing a new subdiscipline with the political support of lawmakers and state institutions.