English and numerous other languages of Europe use a have-perfect of the type ‘I have written’. In classical Greek, we find an apparently similar construction, but the participle is morphologically an active one (alternatively, it can be a so-called ‘middle’ participle). How did this come about, and how — if at all — is it related to the broader history of the perfect in Greek?
The retro-digitisation of the Enggano-German (hereafter EnoGer) dictionary (Kähler 1987) has been taking place at Udayana University, Indonesia, in which the Postdoc Gede Primahadi Wijaya Rajeg is also affiliated.
The Faculty is delighted to be part of a new TORCH network on ancient Anatolia. The goal of this network is to bring together scholars, students, and others interested in the linguistics, archaeology, history, epigraphy, and literature of ancient Anatolia, providing opportunities to meet, listen to each other, exchange ideas, and join forces in shared projects.
The Faculty is thrilled to announce the appointment of Professor Matt Husband as an Associate Editor of Glossa Psycholinguistics. Congratulations, Matt, and all the best in this role!
A celebration of ten years of the Romanian lectorate in Oxford was held on 17 May at Trinity College. Speakers included our distinguished guests the Romanian Ambassador, Her Excellency Mme Laura Popescu; the Director of the Institute of the Romanian Language, Prof. Daiana Cuibus; Prof. Adina Dragomirescu (Romanian Academy and University of Bucharest); and Prof. Alexandru Nicolae (Romanian Academy and University of Bucharest). We heard talks too from local Romanian specialists Prof. Martin Maiden, Dr Oana Uță Bărbulescu, and Mr Fabian Helmrich.
Staff and students of the Language and Brain Laboratory were pleased to welcome the Vice-Chancellor (Irene Tracey) and the Head of the Humanities Division (Dan Grimley) for a visit on 24 February. Here are some photos, shared with the permission of those starring:
The Faculty was proud to host Dr Scott AnderBois (Brown University) as an Astor Visiting Lecturer from 12 to 17 May. He gave a public lecture entitled Documenting A’ingae: an isolate language at the Andes-Amazon interface, and a series of lectures entitled Switch reference and coherence at the syntax-semantics interface. We learnt a lot — many thanks to Dr AnderBois, and to all his collaborators!
The two authors’ collaboration on this subject began with a discussion about a passage of Greek, which took them on a remarkable journey through ancient and medieval texts on Greek enclitics, via accent marks on papyri and in medieval manuscripts. The textual problem they originally set out to solve turned out to have an answer known already to Aldus Manutius, but in the meantime apparently disparate sources of information on enclitic accents had started coming together in a surprising way.
