Author: Simeon Dekker
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004353208
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 220
Book Description
This study is devoted to a corpus of Old Russian letters, written on pieces of birchbark. These unique texts from Novgorod and surroundings give us an exceptional impression of everyday life in medieval Russian society. In this study, the birchbark letters are addressed from a pragmatic angle. Linguistic parameters are identified that shed light on the degree to which literacy had gained ground in communicative processes. It is demonstrated that the birchbark letters occupy an intermediate position between orality and literacy. On the one hand, oral habits of communication persisted, as reflected in how the birchbark letters are phrased; on the other hand, literate modes of expression emerged, as seen in the development of normative conventions and literate formulae.
Old Russian Birchbark Letters
Author: Simeon Dekker
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004353208
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 220
Book Description
This study is devoted to a corpus of Old Russian letters, written on pieces of birchbark. These unique texts from Novgorod and surroundings give us an exceptional impression of everyday life in medieval Russian society. In this study, the birchbark letters are addressed from a pragmatic angle. Linguistic parameters are identified that shed light on the degree to which literacy had gained ground in communicative processes. It is demonstrated that the birchbark letters occupy an intermediate position between orality and literacy. On the one hand, oral habits of communication persisted, as reflected in how the birchbark letters are phrased; on the other hand, literate modes of expression emerged, as seen in the development of normative conventions and literate formulae.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004353208
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 220
Book Description
This study is devoted to a corpus of Old Russian letters, written on pieces of birchbark. These unique texts from Novgorod and surroundings give us an exceptional impression of everyday life in medieval Russian society. In this study, the birchbark letters are addressed from a pragmatic angle. Linguistic parameters are identified that shed light on the degree to which literacy had gained ground in communicative processes. It is demonstrated that the birchbark letters occupy an intermediate position between orality and literacy. On the one hand, oral habits of communication persisted, as reflected in how the birchbark letters are phrased; on the other hand, literate modes of expression emerged, as seen in the development of normative conventions and literate formulae.
Copular Sentences in Russian
Author: Asya Pereltsvaig
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402057938
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 171
Book Description
This book provides a detailed study and a novel Minimalist account of copular sentences in Russian, focusing on case marking alternations (nominative vs. instrumental) and drawing a distinction between two types of copular sentences. On the assumption that Merge is defined in the simplest way possible, it is argued that not all syntactic structures are a(nti)symmetrical. One of the copular sentence types is analyzed as a poster child for symmetrical structures, while the other type is treated as asymmetrical. The originality of this study lies in treating the copula in the two types of copular sentences neither as completely identical nor as two distinct lexical items; instead, the two types of copula are derived through the process of semantic bleaching. Furthermore, it is argued that the two types of the copula need to combine with post-copular phrases of different categories. It is concluded that Russian draws a distinction between saturated DPs and unsaturated NPs, in spite of its renowned lack of overt articles.
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402057938
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 171
Book Description
This book provides a detailed study and a novel Minimalist account of copular sentences in Russian, focusing on case marking alternations (nominative vs. instrumental) and drawing a distinction between two types of copular sentences. On the assumption that Merge is defined in the simplest way possible, it is argued that not all syntactic structures are a(nti)symmetrical. One of the copular sentence types is analyzed as a poster child for symmetrical structures, while the other type is treated as asymmetrical. The originality of this study lies in treating the copula in the two types of copular sentences neither as completely identical nor as two distinct lexical items; instead, the two types of copula are derived through the process of semantic bleaching. Furthermore, it is argued that the two types of the copula need to combine with post-copular phrases of different categories. It is concluded that Russian draws a distinction between saturated DPs and unsaturated NPs, in spite of its renowned lack of overt articles.
How Russian Came to be the Way it is
Author: Tore Nesset
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780893574437
Category : Proto-Slavic language
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Introduction: today's exceptions; yesterday's rules -- The scene: from prehistory to Peter I "The Great" -- The texts: writing and literature in Kievan Rus' and Muscovy -- The toolbox: linguistic tools for analyzing the history of Russian -- Morphology: nouns -- Morphology: pronouns -- Morphology: adjectives -- Morphology: numbers and numerals -- Morphology: verbs -- Syntax -- Phonology: pre-Slavic and common Slavic vowels and diphthongs -- Phonology: pre-Slavic and common Slavic consonants -- Phonology: from old Rusian to modern Russian -- Phonology: stress and vowel reduction -- A visit from Novgorod: the language of the birch bark -- Letters -- Epilogue: reflections on a triangle.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780893574437
Category : Proto-Slavic language
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Introduction: today's exceptions; yesterday's rules -- The scene: from prehistory to Peter I "The Great" -- The texts: writing and literature in Kievan Rus' and Muscovy -- The toolbox: linguistic tools for analyzing the history of Russian -- Morphology: nouns -- Morphology: pronouns -- Morphology: adjectives -- Morphology: numbers and numerals -- Morphology: verbs -- Syntax -- Phonology: pre-Slavic and common Slavic vowels and diphthongs -- Phonology: pre-Slavic and common Slavic consonants -- Phonology: from old Rusian to modern Russian -- Phonology: stress and vowel reduction -- A visit from Novgorod: the language of the birch bark -- Letters -- Epilogue: reflections on a triangle.
The Prehistory of the Balto-Slavic Accent
Author: Jay H. Jasanoff
Publisher: Brill's Studies in Indo-Europe
ISBN: 9789004346093
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 268
Book Description
The Prehistory of the Balto-Slavic Accenthas been written to fill a gap. The interested non-specialist can easily learn about the complex accent systems of the individual Baltic and Slavic languages and how they relate to each other. But the reader interested in the Proto-Balto-Slavic parent system, and how it evolved from the very different system of Proto-Indo-European, has few reliable places to turn. The goal of this book is to provide an accentological interface between Indo-European and Balto-Slavic--to identify and explain the accent shifts and other early changes that give the earliest stages of Baltic and Slavic their distinctive prosodic cast.
Publisher: Brill's Studies in Indo-Europe
ISBN: 9789004346093
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 268
Book Description
The Prehistory of the Balto-Slavic Accenthas been written to fill a gap. The interested non-specialist can easily learn about the complex accent systems of the individual Baltic and Slavic languages and how they relate to each other. But the reader interested in the Proto-Balto-Slavic parent system, and how it evolved from the very different system of Proto-Indo-European, has few reliable places to turn. The goal of this book is to provide an accentological interface between Indo-European and Balto-Slavic--to identify and explain the accent shifts and other early changes that give the earliest stages of Baltic and Slavic their distinctive prosodic cast.
The Slynx
Author: Tatyana Tolstaya
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681371731
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 313
Book Description
“A postmodern literary masterpiece.” –The Times Literary Supplement Two hundred years after civilization ended in an event known as the Blast, Benedikt isn’t one to complain. He’s got a job—transcribing old books and presenting them as the words of the great new leader, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe—and though he doesn’t enjoy the privileged status of a Murza, at least he’s not a serf or a half-human four-legged Degenerator harnessed to a troika. He has a house, too, with enough mice to cook up a tasty meal, and he’s happily free of mutations: no extra fingers, no gills, no cockscombs sprouting from his eyelids. And he’s managed—at least so far—to steer clear of the ever-vigilant Saniturions, who track down anyone who manifests the slightest sign of Freethinking, and the legendary screeching Slynx that waits in the wilderness beyond. Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx reimagines dystopian fantasy as a wild, horripilating amusement park ride. Poised between Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, The Slynx is a brilliantly inventive and shimmeringly ambiguous work of art: an account of a degraded world that is full of echoes of the sublime literature of Russia’s past; a grinning portrait of human inhumanity; a tribute to art in both its sovereignty and its helplessness; a vision of the past as the future in which the future is now.
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681371731
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 313
Book Description
“A postmodern literary masterpiece.” –The Times Literary Supplement Two hundred years after civilization ended in an event known as the Blast, Benedikt isn’t one to complain. He’s got a job—transcribing old books and presenting them as the words of the great new leader, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe—and though he doesn’t enjoy the privileged status of a Murza, at least he’s not a serf or a half-human four-legged Degenerator harnessed to a troika. He has a house, too, with enough mice to cook up a tasty meal, and he’s happily free of mutations: no extra fingers, no gills, no cockscombs sprouting from his eyelids. And he’s managed—at least so far—to steer clear of the ever-vigilant Saniturions, who track down anyone who manifests the slightest sign of Freethinking, and the legendary screeching Slynx that waits in the wilderness beyond. Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx reimagines dystopian fantasy as a wild, horripilating amusement park ride. Poised between Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, The Slynx is a brilliantly inventive and shimmeringly ambiguous work of art: an account of a degraded world that is full of echoes of the sublime literature of Russia’s past; a grinning portrait of human inhumanity; a tribute to art in both its sovereignty and its helplessness; a vision of the past as the future in which the future is now.
Language and Culture in Eighteenth-century Russia
Author: V. M. Zhivov
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 536
Book Description
Zhivov's magisterial work tells the story of the creation of a new vernacularliterary language in modern Russia, an achievement arguably on a par with thenation's extraordinary military successes, territorial expansion, developmentof the arts, and formation of a modern empire.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 536
Book Description
Zhivov's magisterial work tells the story of the creation of a new vernacularliterary language in modern Russia, an achievement arguably on a par with thenation's extraordinary military successes, territorial expansion, developmentof the arts, and formation of a modern empire.
Historical Writing of Early Rus (c. 1000–c. 1400) in a Comparative Perspective
Author: Timofey V. Guimon
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004335595
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 493
Book Description
This book discusses the emergence, forms, composition, content, and the functions of historical writing in Rus and sets the material in a comparative context.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004335595
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 493
Book Description
This book discusses the emergence, forms, composition, content, and the functions of historical writing in Rus and sets the material in a comparative context.
Voices on Birchbark
Author: Jos Schaeken
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004389423
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 230
Book Description
In Voices on Birchbark Jos Schaeken explores the major role that writing on birchbark – an ephemeral, even ‘throw-away’ form of correspondence and administration – played in the vibrant medieval merchant city of Novgorod and other cities in the Russian Northwest. Birchbark literacy was crucial to the organization of Novgorodian society; it was integrated into a huge variety of activities and had a broad social basis; it was used extensively by the laity, by women as well as men, by villagers as well as landlords. Voices on Birchbark is the first book-length study of this unique corpus in English. By examining a representative selection of birchbark texts, Jos Schaeken presents fascinating vignettes of daily medieval life and a holistic picture of the pragmatics of communication in pre-modern societies.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004389423
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 230
Book Description
In Voices on Birchbark Jos Schaeken explores the major role that writing on birchbark – an ephemeral, even ‘throw-away’ form of correspondence and administration – played in the vibrant medieval merchant city of Novgorod and other cities in the Russian Northwest. Birchbark literacy was crucial to the organization of Novgorodian society; it was integrated into a huge variety of activities and had a broad social basis; it was used extensively by the laity, by women as well as men, by villagers as well as landlords. Voices on Birchbark is the first book-length study of this unique corpus in English. By examining a representative selection of birchbark texts, Jos Schaeken presents fascinating vignettes of daily medieval life and a holistic picture of the pragmatics of communication in pre-modern societies.
The First Book of Fashion
Author: Ulinka Rublack
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474249906
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 421
Book Description
This captivating book reproduces arguably the most extraordinary primary source documents in fashion history. Providing a revealing window onto the Renaissance, they chronicle how style-conscious accountant Matthäus Schwarz and his son Veit Konrad experienced life through clothes, and climbed the social ladder through fastidious management of self-image. These bourgeois dandies' agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the sixteenth century: one has to dress to impress, and dress to impress they did. The Schwarzes recorded their sartorial triumphs as well as failures in life in a series of portraits by illuminists over 60 years, which have been comprehensively reproduced in full color for the first time. These exquisite illustrations are accompanied by the Schwarzes' fashion-focussed yet at times deeply personal captions, which render the pair the world's first fashion bloggers and pioneers of everyday portraiture. The First Book of Fashion demonstrates how dress – seemingly both ephemeral and trivial – is a potent tool in the right hands. Beyond this, it colorfully recaptures the experience of Renaissance life and reveals the importance of clothing to the aesthetics and every day culture of the period. Historians Ulinka Rublack's and Maria Hayward's insightful commentaries create an unparalleled portrait of sixteenth-century dress that is both strikingly modern and thorough in its description of a true Renaissance fashionista's wardrobe. This first English translation also includes a bespoke pattern by TONY award-winning costume designer and dress historian Jenny Tiramani, from which readers can recreate one of Schwarz's most elaborate and politically significant outfits.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474249906
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 421
Book Description
This captivating book reproduces arguably the most extraordinary primary source documents in fashion history. Providing a revealing window onto the Renaissance, they chronicle how style-conscious accountant Matthäus Schwarz and his son Veit Konrad experienced life through clothes, and climbed the social ladder through fastidious management of self-image. These bourgeois dandies' agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the sixteenth century: one has to dress to impress, and dress to impress they did. The Schwarzes recorded their sartorial triumphs as well as failures in life in a series of portraits by illuminists over 60 years, which have been comprehensively reproduced in full color for the first time. These exquisite illustrations are accompanied by the Schwarzes' fashion-focussed yet at times deeply personal captions, which render the pair the world's first fashion bloggers and pioneers of everyday portraiture. The First Book of Fashion demonstrates how dress – seemingly both ephemeral and trivial – is a potent tool in the right hands. Beyond this, it colorfully recaptures the experience of Renaissance life and reveals the importance of clothing to the aesthetics and every day culture of the period. Historians Ulinka Rublack's and Maria Hayward's insightful commentaries create an unparalleled portrait of sixteenth-century dress that is both strikingly modern and thorough in its description of a true Renaissance fashionista's wardrobe. This first English translation also includes a bespoke pattern by TONY award-winning costume designer and dress historian Jenny Tiramani, from which readers can recreate one of Schwarz's most elaborate and politically significant outfits.
The Tyranny of Writing
Author: Constanze Weth
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474292445
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 243
Book Description
This book examines the powerful role of writing in society. The invention of writing, independently at various places and times in history, always stood at the cradle of powerful civilizations. It is impossible to imagine modern life without writing. As individuals and social groups we hold high expectations of its potential for societal and personal development. Globally, huge resources have been and are being invested in promoting literacy worldwide. So what could possibly be tyrannical about writing? The title is inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure's argument against writing as an object of linguistic research and what he called la tyrannie de la lettre. His critique denounced writing as an imperfect, distorted image of speech that obscures our view of language and its structure. The chapters of the book, written by experts in language and literacy studies, go beyond this and explore tyrannical aspects of writing in society through history and around the world: from Medieval Novgorod, the European Renaissance and 19th-century France and Germany over colonial Sudan to postcolonial Sri Lanka and Senegal and present-day Hong Kong and Central China to the Netherlands and Spain. The metaphor of 'tyranny of writing' serves as a heuristic for exploring ideologies of language and literacy in culture and society and tensions and contradictions between the written and the spoken word.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474292445
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 243
Book Description
This book examines the powerful role of writing in society. The invention of writing, independently at various places and times in history, always stood at the cradle of powerful civilizations. It is impossible to imagine modern life without writing. As individuals and social groups we hold high expectations of its potential for societal and personal development. Globally, huge resources have been and are being invested in promoting literacy worldwide. So what could possibly be tyrannical about writing? The title is inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure's argument against writing as an object of linguistic research and what he called la tyrannie de la lettre. His critique denounced writing as an imperfect, distorted image of speech that obscures our view of language and its structure. The chapters of the book, written by experts in language and literacy studies, go beyond this and explore tyrannical aspects of writing in society through history and around the world: from Medieval Novgorod, the European Renaissance and 19th-century France and Germany over colonial Sudan to postcolonial Sri Lanka and Senegal and present-day Hong Kong and Central China to the Netherlands and Spain. The metaphor of 'tyranny of writing' serves as a heuristic for exploring ideologies of language and literacy in culture and society and tensions and contradictions between the written and the spoken word.