Ulysses’ Gaze: A Gaze on History
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The first thing God created was the journey, and then came doubt and nostalgia.
––Ulysses’ Gaze (01:24:59–01:25:07)
Blog posts
2024
Sasak: historical linguistics and sociolinguistics
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The Sasak language, spoken by the indigenous people of Lombok Island in Indonesia, has been the subject of much debate among linguists regarding its sub-grouping within the Austronesian language family. The controversy stems from two competing proposals: Adelaar's (2005) Malayo-Sumbawan hypothesis, which places Sasak in a subgroup with Balinese and Sumbawa "Balinese-Sasak-Sumbawa (BSS)," and the alternative view put forth by Blust (2010) and Smith (2017), which includes Sasak in a larger "Western Indonesian (WIn)" subgroup. This paper aims to explore the arguments and evidence presented by both sides of the debate, analyze the implications for understanding Austronesian language history and relationships, and offer a perspective on which sub-grouping seems more persuasive based on the available data.
2023
This is a Prescriptivist World
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2022
Historical Narratives and Conversations — Review on Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast
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Language of the Ashkenazim: The Sound System of Yiddish
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Introduction
2021
De-automatising in Verbal Art: On notions by Mukařovský and Hasan
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Centuries to centuries, various forms of art have been manifesting the world. How humans interpret these creative works are, in many ways, subject to change. Verbal art or literature texts are even more complicated to analyse for the fact of how language itself is dynamic and evolving. A notable Prague School linguist Jan Mukařovský once introduced a framework to analyse artefacts aesthetically, emphasising on language and the semantic value of its patterns. This essay aims to illustrate Mukařovský's notion of de-automatisation using the example of a poem 'Past' by a German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and how it resonates with Ruqaiya Hasan's foregrounding.
Brief Exploration of Gender Representations in Languages
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Languages respond to their cultures. They could often convey gender representations at a syntactic, morphological or lexical level. Based on the grammatical gender, speakers form mental representations of gender (Granham et al., 2012). Unlike Chinese and English, some other languages are grammatically gender-marked. This article will converge on gender stereotypical representations in French and German, providing some observable examples.
Re-approach to Modal Particles in the German Language and Other Discoveries
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Acquiring a language after the critical age stage is not an easy task. It could involve complicated personal or social-cultural issues. The challenges might be more salient for individuals to acquire languages with lower phonological and orthographical similarity or larger linguistic distance from one’s mother language (Floccia et al., 2018) concerning the cognate facilitation effect. For instance, it appears to be easier to learn Mandarin as a second language (L2) or foreign language (Ln) for L1 Cantonese speakers due to their form similarity. In comparison, it could be more complicated for them to learn English regarding the lack of cognate translation equivalents (TEs). Speaking of TEs, they are commonly employed in the language learning process for understanding lexical meanings. Learners would make use of the dictionary meanings as the fundamental recognition of words. However, some words could convey complex meanings concerning linguistic, pragmatic, syntactic and cultural contexts, which L2 and Ln speakers usually have difficulties acquiring. Modal particles are one of the widely discussed examples. There could also be a problem of circularity in dictionaries. Thus, a comprehensive understanding of semantic and pragmatic implications is often required to fully understand and communicate the utterances.
A Brief Semantic Analysis of Negative Concord
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A double negative is a grammatical negation construction that occurs when two or multiple forms of negation are employed in one sentence. In some languages, double negatives would cancel each other out, leading to an affirmative meaning, while others would strengthen the negation. Negative concord (NC), also known as emphatic negation, refers to cases when double or multiple co-occurring phonologically negative elements (NEs) affirming each other and expressing a single negation (de Swart & Sag, 2002; Herburger, 2001). It has been found that there are numerous languages with NC, for instance, Romance (French, Italian, Spanish), Russian, Greek, Afrikaans and some nonstandard English dialects (Giannakidou, 2000). On the contrary, positive-concord languages in which double negatives would ‘neutralize’ include Chinese, German, Japanese and modern Standard English. Negating an utterance that has already been negated is logically, but not pragmatically, identical to not negating the sentence (Herburger, 2001); hence, how negations in NC function have constantly been under quests by scholars. This article will briefly study the negative concord from a semantic perspective, focusing on negations in French.