Download or read book Etymology and Wordplay in Medieval Literature written by Mikael Males and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In modern scholarship, etymology and wordplay are rarely studied in tandem. In the Middle Ages, however, they were intrinsically related, and both feature prominently in medieval literature. Their functions are often at variance with the expectations of the modern reader, in particular when wordplay is used to arrive at crucial answers or to convey theological insights. The studies in this book therefore carry important implications for our understanding of the reception of medieval texts. The authors show how etymology and wordplay in the Middle Ages often served as an impetus for meditation and as a route to truth, but that they could also be put to more mundane uses, such as the bolstering of national pride. In a narrative context, the functions of etymology and wordplay could range from underlining the sexual bravado of the protagonist to being the key indicator of whether the hero would live or die. Opening with a background chapter describing classical and medieval developments of etymology and wordplay, this book presents case studies of the uses of etymology and wordplay in a number of medieval literatures (Latin, Old French, Middle High German, Italian, Old Irish, Old English, Old Norse, Slavic). The articles expand their discussions beyond strictly etymological discourse to various aspects of medieval literature, and thereby highlight the functions of etymological devices in various contexts, with significance ranging from the specific to the open-ended, from the bawdy to the sublime.
Download or read book Puns and Pundits written by Scott B. Noegel and published by Eisenbrauns. This book was released on 2000 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on the use of word play in the literature of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Ugarit, and Israel, and Medieval Hebrew and Arabic literature; includes such topics as: alliterative allusions, rebus writing, ominous homophony, portentous puns, and paronomasia.
Download or read book Ancient and Medieval Greek Etymology written by Arnaud Zucker and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-01-18 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume on Greek synchronic etymology offers a set of papers evidencing the cultural significance of etymological commitment in ancient and medieval literature. The four sections illustrate the variety of approaches of the same object, which for Greek writers was much more than a technical way of studying language. Contributions focus on the functions of etymology as they were intended by the authors according to their own aims. (1) “Philosophical issues” addresses the theory of etymology and its explanatory power, especially in Plato and in Neoplatonism. (2) “Linguistic issues” discusses various etymologizing techniques and the status of etymology, which was criticized and openly rejected by some authors. (3) “Poetical practices of etymology” investigates the ubiquitous presence of etymological reflections in learned poetry, whatever the genre, didactic, aetiological or epic. (4) “Etymology and word-plays” addresses the vexed question of the limit between a mere pun and a real etymological explanation, which is more than once difficult to establish. The wide range of genres and authors and the interplay between theoretical reflection and applied practice shows clearly the importance of etymology in Greek thought.
Download or read book Ancient and Medieval Greek Etymology written by Arnaud Zucker and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-01-18 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume on Greek synchronic etymology offers a set of papers evidencing the cultural significance of etymological commitment in ancient and medieval literature. The four sections illustrate the variety of approaches of the same object, which for Greek writers was much more than a technical way of studying language. Contributions focus on the functions of etymology as they were intended by the authors according to their own aims. (1) “Philosophical issues” addresses the theory of etymology and its explanatory power, especially in Plato and in Neoplatonism. (2) “Linguistic issues” discusses various etymologizing techniques and the status of etymology, which was criticized and openly rejected by some authors. (3) “Poetical practices of etymology” investigates the ubiquitous presence of etymological reflections in learned poetry, whatever the genre, didactic, aetiological or epic. (4) “Etymology and word-plays” addresses the vexed question of the limit between a mere pun and a real etymological explanation, which is more than once difficult to establish. The wide range of genres and authors and the interplay between theoretical reflection and applied practice shows clearly the importance of etymology in Greek thought.
Download or read book The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse written by Roberta Frank and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2022-05-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse, Roberta Frank peers into the northern poet’s workshop, eavesdropping as Old English and Old Norse verse reveal their craft secrets. This book places two vernacular poetries of the long Viking Age into conversation, revealing their membership in a single community of taste, a traditional stylistic ecology that did serious political and historical work. Each chapter seeks the codes of a now-extinct verse technique. The first explores the underlying architecture of the two poetries, their irregularities of pace, startling formal conventions, and tight verbal detail work. The passage of time has worn away most of the circumstantial details that literary scholars in later periods take for granted, but the public relations savvy and aural and syntactic signals of early northern verse remain to some extent retrievable and relatable, an etiquette prized and presumably understood by its audiences. The second and longest chapter investigates the techniques used by early northern poets to retrieve and organize the symmetries of language. It illustrates how supererogatory alliteration and rhyme functioned as aural punctuation, marking off structural units and highlighting key moments in the texts. The third and final chapter describes the extent to which both corpora reveled in negations, litotes, indirection, and down-toners, modes that forced audiences to read between half-lines, to hear what was not said. By decluttering and stripping away excess, by drawing words through a tight mesh of meter, alliteration, and rhyme, the early northern poet filtered out dross and stitched together a poetics of stark contrasts and forebodings. Poets and lovers of poetry of all periods and places will find much to enjoy here. So will students in Old English and Old Norse courses.
Download or read book The Ring of Words in Medieval Literature written by Ulrich Goebel and published by Edwin Mellen Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of 16 essays that deal with aspects of medieval literature: problems of Old Saxon, Old High German, Old English words, and Old Norse literature; devotional biography, hagiography, and autobiography; the reinterpretation of specific words from the courtly era; a manuscript in which the Hebrew alphabet is used to render a collection of randomly chosen Christian prayers; medieval descriptions of India; and a demonstration of how to compile an onomasiological index for a language period such as Early New High German.
Download or read book Etymology and Grammatical Discourse in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages written by Mark Amsler and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study focuses on the uses of the grammatical concept of etymologia in primarily Latin writings from the early Middle Ages. Etymologia is a fundamental procedure and discursive strategy in the philosophy and analysis of language in early medieval Latin grammar, as well as in Biblical exegesis, encyclopedic writing, theology, and philosophy. Read through the frame of poststructuralist analysis of discourse and the philosophy of science, the procedure of the ars grammatica are interpreted as overlapping genres (commentary, glossary, encyclopedia, exegesis) which use different verbal or extraverbal criteria to explain the origins and significations of words and which establish different epistemological frames within which an etymological account of language is situated. The study also includes many translations of heretofore untranslated passages from Latin grammatical and exegetical writings.
Download or read book Reinventing Babel in Medieval French written by Emma Campbell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-29 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue--in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science--but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media, and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality; ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. How can untranslatability help us to think about the historical as well as the cultural and linguistic dimensions of translation? For the past two centuries, theoretical debates about translation have responded to the idea that translation overcomes linguistic and cultural incommensurability, while never inscribing full equivalence. More recently, untranslatability has been foregrounded in projects at the intersections between translation studies and other disciplines, notably philosophy and comparative literature. The critical turn to untranslatability re-emphasizes the importance of translation's negotiation with foreignness or difference and prompts further reflection on how that might be understood historically, philosophically, and ethically. If translation never replicates a source exactly, what does it mean to communicate some elements and not others? What or who determines what is translatable, or what can or cannot be recontextualized? What linguistic, political, cultural, or historical factors condition such determinations? Central to these questions is the way translation negotiates with, and inscribes asymmetries among, languages and cultures, operations that are inevitably ethical and political as well as linguistic. This book explores how approaching questions of translatability and untranslatability through premodern texts and languages can inform broader interdisciplinary conversations about translation as a concept and a practice. Working with case studies drawn from the francophone cultures of Flanders, England, and northern France, it explores how medieval texts challenge modern definitions of language, text, and translation and, in so doing, how such texts can open sites of variance and non-identity within what later became the hegemonic global languages we know today.
Download or read book Medieval Arts Doctrines on Ambiguity and Their Places in Langland s Poetics written by John Chamberlin and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2000-09-07 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chamberlin's focal point for this synthesis is the concept of ambiguity, which has played an important role in the liberal arts tradition and in medieval discourses regarding reading and preaching - discourses that are fundamental to Langland's poetic ways with words. His work takes its place among other recent attempts to retrieve medieval literary theory, making it possible for it to inform the reading of medieval literature, but places this theory within a particularly wide context. Chamberlin claims that the excess of meaning ambiguity gives language is at least as important to the understanding of Piers Plowman and other medieval texts as is allegory. He deals with lexical ambiguity and the ambiguity of words-as-words - in which words themselves are taken as objects - offering linguistic, philosophical, and historical perspectives on these subjects. How ambiguity works in Langland's poetry is explained in close analysis of a number of passages from the poem. Chamberlin's overview of the historical development of the concept of ambiguity pays special attention to the doctrines of Augustine and the twelfth-century masters. He elucidates these by reference to similar ideas from Romantic and twentieth-century theorists, providing a coherent view of language that stands as an alternative to structuralist and post-structuralist views.
Download or read book Ancient and Medieval Greek Etymology written by Arnaud Zucker and published by de Gruyter. This book was released on 2025-02-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume on ancient Greek synchronic etymology offers a set of papers evidencing the cultural significance of etymological commitment in ancient and medieval literature. It continues a collective work (begun in a first volume under the same title) of reflection on, and valorization of the significance, development and impact of the Greek etymologizing thought. The three sections illustrate the variety of approaches to the same object, which was much more than a technical way of studying language for Greek writers. Contributions focus on the functions of etymology as they were intended by the authors according to their own aims. The wide range of genres and authors and the interplay between theoretical reflection and applied practice demonstrate the importance of etymology in Greek culture. The studies proposed here show how versatile the uses of etymology are in ancient texts, appearing both technical and inspired, literary and philosophical, serious and playful, lexicological and conceptual. Part of them deals with the link and difference between etymology and etiology. The work is of special interest to scholars on etymology in ancient Greek scholarship and on more general issues in lexicology, semiology, and folk-etymology.
Download or read book Dante s Divine Comedy written by K. P. Clarke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-30 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vividly illustrates the originality and energy of the Divine Comedy, for readers old and new, through Dante's singular language.
Download or read book Structure and Analogy in the Playful Lexicon of Spanish written by David A. Pharies and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-08-31 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, founded by Gustav Gröber in 1905, is among the most renowned publications in Romance Studies. It covers the entire field of Romance linguistics, including the national languages as well as the lesser studied Romance languages. The editors welcome submissions of high-quality monographs and collected volumes on all areas of linguistic research, on medieval literature and on textual criticism. The publication languages of the series are French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian as well as German and English. Each collected volume should be as uniform as possible in its contents and in the choice of languages.
Download or read book Studies on Medieval Empathies written by Karl Frederick Morrison and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contents of this book cover a chronological bibliography of Karl E. Morrison's published works, reconstructing sanctity and refiguring saints in early medieval Gaul, a sanctifying serpent, Rome and the Romans in the medieval mind, and much more.
Download or read book A Place for Everything written by Judith Flanders and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a New York Times-bestselling historian comes the story of how the alphabet ordered our world. A Place for Everything is the first-ever history of alphabetization, from the Library of Alexandria to Wikipedia. The story of alphabetical order has been shaped by some of history's most compelling characters, such as industrious and enthusiastic early adopter Samuel Pepys and dedicated alphabet champion Denis Diderot. But though even George Washington was a proponent, many others stuck to older forms of classification -- Yale listed its students by their family's social status until 1886. And yet, while the order of the alphabet now rules -- libraries, phone books, reference books, even the order of entry for the teams at the Olympic Games -- it has remained curiously invisible. With abundant inquisitiveness and wry humor, historian Judith Flanders traces the triumph of alphabetical order and offers a compendium of Western knowledge, from A to Z. A Times (UK) Best Book of 2020
Download or read book Hebrew Wordplay and Septuagint Translation Technique in the Fourth Book of the Psalter written by Elizabeth H. P. Backfish and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines numerous Hebrew wordplays not identified and discussed in previous research, and the technique of the Septuagint translators, by offering another criterion of evaluation – essentially, their concern about the style of translating Hebrew into Greek. Elizabeth Backfish's study analyzes seventy-four wordplays employed by the Hebrew poets of Psalms 90-106, and how the Septuagint renders Hebrew wordplay in Greek. Backfish estimates that the Septuagint translators were able to render 31% of the Hebrew semantic and phonetic wordplays (twenty-four total), most of which required some sort of transformation, or change, to the text in order to function in Greek. After providing a thorough summary of research methods on wordplay, definitions and research methodology, Backfish summarizes all examples of wordplay within the Fourth Psalter, and concludes with examples of the wordplay's replication, similar rendition or textual variation in the Septuagint. Emphasising the creativity and ingenuity of the Septuagint translators' work in passages that commentators often too quickly identify as the results of scribal error or a variant Vorlage from the Masoretic text, Backfish shows how the aptitude and flexibility displayed in the translation technique also contributes to conversations in modern translation studies.
Download or read book Mind Matters written by Cary J. Nederman and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2009 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marcia Colish is one of the most influential scholars of the history of medieval and early modern thought, the author of numerous books and scores of articles in the field, as well as a pioneering President of the Medieval Academy of America. This volume honours her accomplishments with papers by her many colleagues, friends, and former students, who are themselves prominent scholars from across a range of disciplines. The chapters are diverse chronologically and topically, yet they are all stimulated by themes that Prof. Colish has explored during her long and distinguished career. They address the richness of European intellectual history between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries, treating the multiple heritages of philosophy, theology, political theory, historiography, classical reception, and many other subjects to which her scholarship extends. The volume demonstrates the power of ideas in the development of European history generally, revealing that the careful study of the works of the 'mind' does indeed 'matter'.
Download or read book A Dictionary of True Etymologies written by Adrian Room and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1986 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
