32.507, Calls: Greek, Ancient; Hist Ling/Greece

Wed Feb 10 19:23:35 UTC 2021

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-507. Wed Feb 10 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.507, Calls: Greek, Ancient; Hist Ling/Greece

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Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2021 14:22:41
From: Marja Vierros [marja.vierros at helsinki.fi]
Subject: New Light from the East: Linguistic Perspectives on Non-Literary Papyri and Related Sources

Full Title: New Light from the East: Linguistic Perspectives on Non-Literary Papyri and Related Sources 

Date: 15-Sep-2021 - 17-Sep-2021
Location: Athens, Greece 
Contact Person: Marja Vierros
Meeting Email: newlightfromtheeast at gmail.com
Web Site: https://www.newlightfromtheeast.ugent.be/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics 

Subject Language(s): Greek, Ancient (grc)

Call Deadline: 31-Mar-2021 

Meeting Description:

It has been nearly fifteen years since the conference ‘Buried Linguistic
Treasure: The Potential of Papyri and Related Sources for the Study of Greek
and Latin’ was organized in Oxford, Christ Church (30/06/2006 – 02/07/2006).
In the edited volume that resulted from that conference (Evans and Obbink
2010), the organizers noted that while the linguistic significance of Greek
and Latin papyri had been recognized ever since non-literary papyri became
available to scholars in large quantity, research on the texts had not
progressed much after the groundbreaking work of Adolf Deissmann and his
followers, culminating in Edwin Mayser’s grammar of the Ptolemaic papyri.
Similar observations were made in other, contemporary studies: Verhoogt
(2010, 67), for example, noted that while ‘it is not often that a language
can be followed in this detail in writing for a period of over one
millennium’, the attention of linguistic specialists to the material had been
‘relatively minimal’.

Significant advances have been made in the past decade, perhaps most visibly
in the area of digital humanities: digital tools such as the Duke Databank of
Documentary Papyri (https://www.papyri.info) and Trismegistos
(https://www.trismegistos.org) have been expanded and further developed, now
also including linguistic functionalities, and new tools have become
available that facilitate accessing and studying specific corpora, their
metadata and their linguistic and graphic characteristics, including PapPal,
Sematia, Synallagma, etc. Now that the field is so rapidly and extensively
developing, it has been suggested that the twenty-first century will come to
be known as ‘the century of digital papyrology’ (Reggiani 2017, 9–10), after
the example of the ‘century of epigraphy’ (the nineteenth century) and ‘the
century of papyrology’ (the twentieth century).

Considerable progress has also been made in terms of linguistic groundwork
properly speaking. A number of areas identified by Evans and Obbink (2010,
9–12) as ‘key issues for future research’ have been addressed in recent
studies, such as scribal norms and practices (e.g. Halla-aho 2018; Vierros
2019; Stolk 2020), linguistic diversity and language contact (e.g. Vierros
2012; Leiwo 2020), and syntactic and other types of linguistic development
(Bentein 2017; di Bartolo 2020). Other important topics that have been
explored during the past years include lexicography (e.g. Torallas Tovar
2020), phonology (Dahlgren 2017), linguistic levels and varieties (e.g. Evans
2015), and rhetorical strategies and politeness (e.g. Papathomas and Koroli
2014). A number of edited volumes dedicated partly or solely to the language
of the papyri have appeared (e.g. Leiwo, Halla-aho, and Vierros 2012; Bentein,
Janse, and Soltic 2017; Bentein and Janse 2020), and funds for several
projects (small- and large-scale) about the language of the papyri have been
awarded.

The main aim of this conference is to continue the discussion on the language
of the papyri, giving scholars an opportunity to present the results of
ongoing research, to propose new approaches, theoretical discussions and
methodologies, or to introduce new projects, data repositories, tools, or
corpora. At the same time, we want to critically reflect on what has been
achieved so far, and where we would like to be headed in the future: an
important question in this regard is to what extent ‘the language of the
papyri’ as a field of study focusing on Greek and (to some extent) Latin
sources, should seek to relate itself more explicitly to other fields of
study, such as epigraphy, Semitic documentary culture, paleography, etc.

Call for Papers: 

Interested scholars are invited to submit proposals (600 words max.) for 20
min. papers to newlightfromtheeast at gmail.com by March 31, 2021 at the latest.
Apart from Greek non-literary sources, proposals may engage with related
traditions, such as Latin, Coptic and Arabic.

COVID 19: 
We sincerely hope that it will be possible to hold the conference on site, but
do not exclude the possibility that the conference will be held online because
of the COVID-19 virus. Should the latter be the case, we will inform
participants well in advance. When submitting your proposal, please indicate
(i) whether you will/will not attend if the event happens only online, and
(ii) whether you only want to participate if the event takes place online.

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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-507	
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