Language or Dialect?
The History of a Conceptual Pair
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 1 November 2020
- ISBN 9780198845713
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages370 pages
- Size 238x163x28 mm
- Weight 754 g
- Language English 50
Categories
Short description:
This book explores the intriguing and complex history of the language/dialect distinction, a puzzle which has long fascinated linguists and laypeople alike. It takes the reader from the prehistory of the distinction in antiquity, through the crucial early modern period, up to the approaches to language and dialect adopted in modern linguistics.
MoreLong description:
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
This book provides a historiographic study of the distinction between language and dialect, a puzzle which has long fascinated linguists and laypeople alike. It offers a comprehensive account of the intriguing and complex history of the language-dialect pair, and shows that its real origins can be found in sixteenth-century humanist scholarship. The book begins with a survey of the prehistory of the language/dialect distinction in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Raf Van Rooy then provides a detailed investigation of the emergence, establishment, and development of the conceptual pair during the early modern period, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, when linguistic diversity was first studied in depth. Finally, the much-debated and ambiguous fate of the language/dialect opposition in modern linguistics is explored: although a number of earlier ideas were adopted by later scholars, many linguists today question the notion of a seemingly arbitrary and subjective distinction between language and dialect.
Van Rooy's masterful and eminently readable study explores this topic across more than two millennia. Filled with a breadth of historiographic detail, the book's 24 well-sequenced chapters consider the conceptual pair language and dialect against the backdrop of successive stages of Western intellectual development ... This tour-de-force of erudition will interest linguists and the general public alike.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Part I: Prehistory, 500 BC-1500
A dive into the prehistory of the conceptual pair
The exception to the rule: Lingua and idioma in Roger Bacon's thought
Part II: The origin of the conceptual pair, 1500-1550
From dogs and hounds to languages and dialects: The conceptual pair in Conrad Gessner's work
Lingua and dialectus: From synonymy to contrast
Hellenism, standardization, and info-lust: The genesis of the conceptual pair in context
Part III: Consolidation by elaboration, 1550-1650
Space and nation: Greek definitions transformed
Aristotle's legacy: Substance, accidents, and mutual intelligibility
A subjective touch: Language beats dialect
The conceptual pair and language history: Language generates dialects
Consolidation by elaboration: Drawing the balance
The conceptual pair in transition: The case of Georg Stiernhielm
Part IV: Systematization and rationalization, 1650-1800
Putting the conceptual pair on the scholarly agenda: The orientalist Albert Schultens
Lexicostatistics avant la lettre: The historian Johann Christoph Gatterer and the conceptual pair
Classes of variation: How do languages and dialects differ?
Between systematization and rationalization: The conceptual pair through the Enlightenment lens
Part V: From silent adoption to outspoken abandonment, after 1800
From Jones to Gabelentz: Silent adoption and renewed suspicion
Schuchardt the iconoclast
From Saussure to 1954: Structuralism and the language/dialect distinction
Mutual intelligibility: The number one criterion?
Between two extremes: Generative and sociolinguistic interpretations
A gentle goodbye? Dialect stripped for parts
Language, dialect, and the general public-or how not to popularize knowledge
Language and dialect between past and future: Terminological success, conceptual failure
