From antiquity to the modern era, the assumption of linguistic universality has underpinned – and the later quest for it has shaped – thinking, theory, and practice. Once it became clear that differences among languages went beyond issues of mere nomenclature, scholars asked what languages share and how such commonalities can be described, represented, and explained. Well-known examples include the strands of general grammar; proposals for constructing universal characters, alphabets and languages, and later advances in typology and implicational universals.
Rome is emblematic of such universalizing projects: the Latin grammatical model became both template and straitjacket for describing the languages of the world. The city was also a center for universalizing endeavors associated with the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda Fide) and representatives of the Society of Jesus such as Athanasius Kircher and Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro.
This year, the International Colloquium of the “Studienkreis Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft” (Research Group on the History of Linguistics) brings together scholars from Norway, Germany, and around the world to discuss these topics at the Norwegian Institute in Rome.
Program
Thursday 17 September (09:30–17:30): The Premodern World and the Road to the 19th Century
Welcome and Introduction (09:30–10:00)
Han Lamers (DNIR) – Welcome
Per Pippin Aspaas, Angelika Rüter, Toon Van Hal – Introduction
Session 1 (10:00–11:00)
Stephanos Matthaios (Athens) – Sextus Empiricus' Gegen die Grammatiker oder: Was die Grammatik über das Wesen und den Wert der Sprache nicht zu erkennen vermag.
Lionel Dumarty (Paris) – Is Alexandrian Grammar a General Grammar?
Coffee break (11:00)
Session 2 (11:30–12:30)
Michael M. Isermann (Heidelberg) – The Emergence of Linguistic Neoplatonism: From the Universal Language of Nature to the Universal Language Projects of the 17th Century
Camiel Hamans (Poznań) – The Hunt for the Ursprache as Search for the Truth.
Lunch break (12:30)
Session 3 (14:00–15:30)
Frans Plank (Oxford) – Early Typology: Tommaso Campanella on Noun and Verb Inflection.
Per Pippin Aspaas (Tromsø) – Intellectual Roots of Finno-Ugrian Linguistics, c. 1500-1800.
Nicolas Gignac (Freiburg im Breisgau) – Universalität unter Druck: französische Jesuiten und indigene, polysynthetische Sprachen in Neufrankreich im 17. Jahrhundert.
Break (15:30)
Session 4 (16:00–17:30)
Gerda Haßler (Potsdam) – Justifications for Linguistic Universals from the Mid-18th to the Early 19th Century.
Alena A. Fidlerová (Prague) – A School Grammar as a Transnational Model: Felbiger's Verbesserte Anleitung and Central European Grammar Writing around 1800.
Friederike Spitzl-Dupic (Clermont-Ferrand) – Die Behandlung des Numerus in der Geschichte des Sprachdenkens mit Fokus auf allgemeingrammatische Texte des 17. bis 19. Jahrhunderts.
Friday 18 September (09:30–17:00): 19th‑ and 20th-Century Developments
Session 5 (9:30–11:00)
Bernhard Hurch (Graz) – Apologie und Universalien: baskische Grammatiker am Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts.
Beijia Chen (Beijing) – Lautgesetz, Universality, and the Positioning of Linguistics.
Xiwei Guo (Dresden) – Die Inversion der Gelehrsamkeit: Philosophische Sinologie und sinologische Philosophie.
Break (11:00)
Session 6 (11:30–12:00)
Rolf Kemmler (Vila Real) – Johan Nikolai Madvigs Latinsk Sproglære til Skolebrug (1841), die deutschsprachige Lateinische Sprachlehre für Schulen (1844) und die Übersetzungen von Madvigs Werk in andere europäische Sprachen.
Lunch break (12:00)
Session 7 (14:00–15:00)
James McElvenny (Siegen) – The "Mark", from Gestalt Phenomenon to Language Universal.
Alexander M. Teixeira Kalkhoff (Heidelberg) – On the Universality of Word Classes.
Break (15:00)
Session 8 and Conclusions (15:30–17:00)
Sarah Melker (Graz) – Possession as a Universal in Descriptive and Comparative Linguistics.
Hanxiao Huang (Munich) – Diachrone Entwicklung und Einflussfaktoren der dativen Verwendung ditransitiver Konstruktionen im Deutschen und Chinesischen am Beispiel der Verben „geben“/„给(gěi)“
Conclusions
On 19 September, there will be a field trip in Rome for the participants.
Questions?
For more information, please contact Prof. Toon Van Hal.