16.774, Review: Historical Ling: Braunmüller & Ferraresi (2003)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-774. Mon Mar 14 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.774, Review: Historical Ling: Braunmüller & Ferraresi (2003)

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1)
Date: 14-Mar-2005
From: Adam Siegel < apsiegel at ucdavis.edu >
Subject: Aspects of Multilingualism in European Language History 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2005 18:34:57
From: Adam Siegel < apsiegel at ucdavis.edu >
Subject: Aspects of Multilingualism in European Language History 
 

EDITORS: Braunmüller, Kurt; Ferraresi, Gisella
TITLE: Aspects of Multilingualism in European Language History
SERIES: Hamburg Studies on Multilingualism 2
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2003
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-186.html


Adam Siegel, Shields Library, University of California, Davis

SUMMARY

Following an introduction by the volume's editors (pp. 1-15) describing 
the need for a survey of multilingualism among speakers of selected 
minority language(s) in various parts of Europe over the centuries, a 
roughly geographically arranged collection of ten essays discussing 
contact-induced change among multilingual communities in Europe.  The 
contributions in volume 2 in Benjamins' Hamburg Studies on Multilingualism 
individually stake out a relatively small area: reliance on secondary 
sources, surveys of small speech communities, textual analyses of 
restricted corpora (including single-person correspondence), and a 
tendency to devote a good deal of space to establishing political-
historical contexts for contact-induced language change, particularly 
among minority languages.

OVERVIEW

David Trotter's "Oceano vox: You Never Know Where a Ship Comes From" 
discusses the lexicon of Middle English shipping and seafaring, noting the 
linguistically rich sources for this vocabulary, including contributions 
from other Germanic languages (Norse, Dutch, Low German), Latin and 
French, and as far afield as Arabic.  Drawing heavily on Bertil Sandahl's 
magisterial Middle English Sea Terms, Trotter discusses the successive 
stages of shipping loanwords into English stock, noting that most of the 
Old Norse terminology predates the Norman Conquest.  While the influence 
of (Norman) French on the English shipping lexicon is substantial, it is 
argued that the French component (rather than what Sandahl calls "Channel 
words," or a "fairly homogeneous core of terms that were common to the 
seafaring language of all the Germanic nations,") tends to reflect a mode 
of transmission for technological innovations from more distant cultures, 
viz., calfater, calfatyngge < French calfatar < Arabic qalfaata 'to 
caulk.'  Trotter then discusses ship naming conventions, concluding that 
the linguistic variety of ships' names in England in the period further 
reflect the multilingual character of the shipping community.

Elin Fredsted's "Language Contact and Bilingualism in Flensburg in the 
Middle of the 19th Century" addresses the complex history of Schleswig, a 
compact region with a linguistic history associated with South Jutish 
(oral and written) and Low German (vernaculars) and Danish and High German 
(both standard literary languages) by focusing on Flensburg-Danish 
correspondence, asserting that the idiolect approximates the regiolect of 
Flensburg in the mid-19th century (a mixture of all four languages and 
dialects).

Agnete Nesse's essay, "Written and Spoken Languages in Bergen in the Hansa 
Era" concentrates on the regiolect of the coastal Norwegian city of Bergen 
during the heyday of the Hansa era (ca. 1350-ca. 1750), which left a 
permanent mark on the Norwegian language through the large-scale influence 
of German -- mainly Low German.  It is noted that the Bergen dialect is 
characterized by a greater divergence between urban and rural dialect than 
in any other part of the country, along with sociolinguistic leveling of 
prestige distinctions in grammatical gender.  It is argued that some of 
the distinctiveness of the Bergen dialect, in both its formal and social 
characteristics, is due to the importance of the city as a Hansa port, as 
can be seen in a review of the written record.  Hansa Norway may also have 
been characterized by a "double diglossia," among Danish, Norwegian, and 
Low German.  While much of the Low German lexicon has disappeared from the 
Bergen dialect, it is argued that grammatical features introduced during 
the Hansa period can be traced to Low German influence, such as leveling 
of gender distinctions.

Marika Tandefelt's essay, "Vyborg: Free Trade in Four Languages," 
discusses the specifics of what is today a Russian city on the Finnish 
border, with, perforce, a lengthy history in Swedish, Finnish, Russian, 
and German.  The changing historical status of each speech community can 
be examined through the written record (although later records, from the 
19th and 20th century, are more numerous; some archival material was lost 
during WWII); also presented are word and phrase lists from each language 
that attest to the multilingual character of the city before WWII.  These 
lists were elicited through interviews with older inhabitants, along with 
older elicitation materials.  It is acknowledged that little information 
about the ethnic or linguistic makeup of Vyborg after the town received 
its charter in 1403.  The sketch of Vyborg's linguistic history is patchy 
and poorly sourced.

Björn Wiemer's "Dialect and Language Contacts on the Territory of the 
Grand Duchy of Lithuania From the 15th Century until 1939" offers a very 
broad outline of the sociolinguistic situation in the Grand Duchy of 
Lithuania, concentrating primarily on Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, and 
Belarusian (but not Yiddish), and focusing on the region straddling the 
contemporary Lithuanian-Belarus border.  A lengthy history of the 
political situation (changes in official language from Polish to Russian 
to Lithuanian or Belarusian in the modern era) gives way to a very brief 
summary of fieldwork conducted in northeastern Lithuania (interbellum 
Poland) in 2000-2001 revealed a greater usage of Lithuanian than 
anticipated, but with little use of Belarusian.

Lars Wollin's "Swedish and Swedish: On the Origin of Diglossia and Social 
Variation in the Swedish Language" examines the extent to which register 
diglossia in 19th century Swedish (marked primarily lexically, but also 
grammatically) is a reflection of prescriptive models for educated 
Swedish.  Wollin ranges freely over the history of Swedish grammarians, 
from Adolf Noreen (at the turn of the last century) back to Sven Hof in 
the mid 18th century, the Reformation Bible translation of 1541, back to 
the earliest Biblical translations of the 13th and 14th centuries.  Wollin 
concludes that the confinement of developing literary Swedish to 
scriptural translation led to an artificially high register for the 
standard language that lasted nearly up to the present.

Diana Chirita's "Did Latin Influence German Word Order?" reviews and 
reconsiders the debate over the role of Latin in determining the verb-
final subordinate clause in German.  The author admits that the question 
is a difficult one, and the historical record is ambiguous.  While doing 
an admirable job of surveying past research, she does not come to any firm 
conclusion on possible influence from Latin on Modern German.

Ana Maria Martins' "From Unity to Diversity in Romance Syntax" discusses 
status-linked diglossia (Portuguese and Spanish) in 15th and 16th-century 
Portugal and its possible effect on divergent evolution of literary 
Portuguese and Spanish in the centuries to follow.  Textual analysis shows 
that over time syntactic unity in clitic placement gives way to divergence 
(near-universal proclisis in Portuguese).

"Sardinian Between Maintenance and Change" by Rosita Rindler Schjerve 
examines language shift in the Sardinian speech community, providing a 
sketch of Sardinia's political history (Spanish was the de factor official 
language of the island until the 19th century); only after Italian 
unification was there a concerted attempt to make knowledge of Standard 
Italian compulsory, through education and officialdom.  In 1998 the 
Italian government recognized Sardinian as a minority language, the 
largest in the country.  The author draws on a corpus of Sardinian (54 
conversations), elicited during the recording of informal conversations in 
1991-1995, identifying the various points in conversation where 
codeswitching occurs, as well as the demographic variables likely to 
affect codeswitching between Sardinian and Italian.  

Alexandra Vella's contribution, "Language Contact and Maltese Intonation," 
claims to offer a new interpretation of the evolution of Maltese as the 

result of language contact, through the underexamined medium of 
intonation.  The organization of the paper begins with an overview of the 
contact linguistic situation for Maltese (between Arabic dialects and 
Italian).  It is noted that Malta is an officially multilingual country 
(Maltese shares official status with English, and Italian is widely used), 
and a brief account of the history of the language (Semitic stratum + 
Romance superstratum + English adstratum) gives way to a description of 
the segmental phonology of the language.  Relying heavily on earlier 
accounts, Vella briefly discusses consonantal and vowel phonemes in turn, 
and then moves on to consider the likely influence from Italian on 
antepenultimate stress in Maltese.  The core of the paper is a study of 
intonation, in which Maltese intonation is subjected to an Autosegmental-
Metrical (AM) analysis.

CONCLUSIONS

This volume seems like a collection of papers that have not had to undergo 
any sort of peer review process.  Some of the contributions rely too 
heavily on earlier, more authoritative sources (Trotter, Vella).  Some 
contributors do use first-hand empirical data but in a manner that is 
almost throw-away (cf. Tandefelt and Wiemer): i.e., providing only a brief 
description of their methodology and results at the very end of the paper. 
However some others, including Schjerve and Martins, are solid, well-
researched, contributions to the field.  While I found almost every essay 
prima facie interesting, I would like to think that a more rigorous review 
process prior to publication would ensure that these papers make a more 
significant contribution to the field. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Adam Siegel is a reference librarian at the University of California, 
Davis.  His research interests include language contact in the Balkans, 
translation theory, contact-induced language change, and Slavic languages.





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