Lingua Humanitatis (인문언어)
International Association for Humanistic Studies in Languge
- Semi Annual
- /
- 1598-2130(pISSN)
Domain
- Linguistics > Linguistics, General
Volume 2 Issue 2
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This paper aims to illustrate and illuminate the relationship between language and its neighbor disciplines, in particular between language and literature, language and religion, and language and music. 1. Language and literature. Literature is an art of language. Therefore, linguistics, the science of language, should be able to explain how the grammar of literature elevates and ordinary language into a literary language. I illustrate poetic syntax with examples from Shelley, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. 2. Language and religion. I show how a linguistic analysis of a religious text can illuminate the background, authorship, chronology, etc., of a religious text with an example from the Book of Daniel. I also illustrate how a misanalysis of a poetic meter led to a mistranslation with an example from the Book of Psalms. 3. Language and music. First I trace an epochal event in the history of the Western music, i.e., the change of the musical style from the liturgical music of Latin in which the rhythm was created by the alternation of syllable duration into the liberated music of German in which the rhythm was generated by the alternation of lexical stress. I then illustrate a parallelism between linguistic and musical structures with several musical pieces including Gregorian chant, the 16th century music of Palestrina, the 17th century music of Schutz, the 18th century music of Mozart, and the 19th century Viennese music. Finally, the importance of text-tune (verse-melody) association is discussed with examples of mismatches in translated Korean hymns and contemporary Korean lyrical songs. In the concluding part, I speculate on some factors that are responsible for the same organizational devices in three different modes of human communication. An answer may be that all are under the same laws of mind that govern the way man perceives and organizes nature, i.e., the same cognitive abilities of man, in particular, the capacity to organize and impose structure on their respective inputs.
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The 1990s have seen the publication of many books devoted to Language and Ideology (cf. Joseph & Taylor 1990. for one of the early ones) even though the term 'ideology' itself has remained ill-defined (Woolard 1998). The focus of attention has usually been placed on the particular use of language and often for some kind of 'political' ends, not on linguistic or other scholarship which might have been driven by some sort of ideology, i.e., a bundle of assumptions which themselves were taken as given. At least since Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism, it has been clear to everyone that scholars construct their conceptualization of things in line with their understanding of the cultural, social, and political world in which they live, and that this often unreflected 'pre-understanding' effects their view of cultures that are different from theirs and more often than not geographically and temporally distant from theirs. This recognition has had a sobering effect no doubt, and Said's book has long since become 'mainstream.' Much more disturbing to the scholarly profession has been the publication of Martin Bernal's Black Athena in 1987, since it went much further, going beyond accusations of colonialism and cultural bias, in suggesting that the Western representation of Classical Greece over the past two hundred years was false and that what had been accepted until now about occidental antiquity must now be seen derived from African-Asiatic cultures of the Near East, notably that of the Ancient Egyptians, and that no other than Socrates should be seen as black man. While we may understand the intellectual climate in the United States that led academics to present 'myth as history' (Lefkowitz 1996), it is obvious that lines of regular scholarly principles of investigation have been crossed (cf Lefkowitz & Rogers 1996). The present paper investigates what may be seen as the ideological underpinnings of such work. After reviewing some recent scholarship in the area of linguistic historiography that have shown that academic work has never been 'value-neutral' (as may have been assumed or has been claimed by some practitioners), it is argued that in effect one must be aware of what Clemens Knobloch has recently termed Resonanzbedarf, i.e., the desire, whether conscious or not, of scholars-and probably scientists, too-to have their work recognized by the educated public and that, in so doing, their discourses tend to pick up on contemporary popular notions. These efforts may be harmless if everyone was to recognize these allusions and adoption of certain lexical. items(buzz words) as props or what Germans call Versatzstiicke, but history tells us that this has not always been the case. Still, as Hutton (1999) has shown, not all scholarship during the Third Reich for example can simply be dismissed as worthless because it was conducted in under a prevailing political ideology. Indeed, in seemingly innocent times, linguists can be shown to frame their argument in a way that makes them appear so utterly superior to their predecessors (cf. Lawson 2001). Upon closer inspection, those discourses turn out to be much like those of scholars in nationalistic environments that have tended to select their 'facts' to prove a particular hypothesis (cf., e.g., Koerner 2001). The article argues for scholars to take a more active role in exploding myths, scientifically unfounded claims, and ideologically driven distortions, especially those that are socially and politically harmful.
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The word play on h(e)art-hunting has become a virtual commonplace in criticism of Chaucer′s Book of the Duchess. Less widely discussed is the third meaning of ME herte, "hurt." The "hart"/ "heart" pun is, however, only implicit in the poem, while the rhyme of "heart" and "hurt" in lines 883-84 makes clear the close association of the terms for Chaucer. Earlier commentators insisted that this was in fact an instance of rime riche or "identical rhyme," but if it is so it is striking that it is the unique instance of the rhyme in Chaucer, whose works are full of occasions for hurt hearts. The essay argues that this is, instead, an instance of near-rhyme and that the confusion in scribal spellings of ME hurten(with ′u,′ ′0,′ ′i,′ ′y,′ and ′e′ ) suggests uncertainties about its root vowel that modem linguistic study has not clarified completely. If the rhyme of herte ("hurt") with herte ("heart") is, however, established by these lines in BD, then it is probably reasonable to ask about all the occasions where characters in the poem are hurt by emotional or physical distress. In the cases of A1cyone and the Man in Blak, the hurt is revealed plainly as the death of a loved one, and Alcyone′s death and the Man in Blak′s return "homwarde" offer contrasting responses to the realization and acknowledgement of their loss. In the case of the Narrator, however, the exact nature of his "hurt" is nowhere made clear and the questions this Jack of clarity raises for the reader remain unanswered when the poem declares its "hert-huntyng" done. Further examination of the Narrator′s character and his role in the poem may reveal him to be a physician himself in need of healing, and this reading of his character may identify him as an ancestor as much of Chaucer′s Pardoner as of the Pilgrim Narrator of Canterbury Tales.
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The six fabliaux of the Canterbury Tales are a notable artistic achievement. Of all of them, however, the Merchant's Tale is the most notable to show Chaucer's development of the scope of this genre. We will look briefly at the characters of the fabliau narrators who are crucial to Chaucer's drama of relationships in the course of the Canterbury pilgrimage framework. To distinguish the accomplishment of the Merchant's Tale, we will consider the relative merits of each of the other five fabliaux in the Canterbury Tales. The least flawed of the fabliau narrators, the Merchant will tell a powerful tale about an old man's lust turned into a hasty marriage gone wrong that aims its satire at the noble ruling class of the land, not the usual targets of Chaucer's or most other writers' fabliaux. Further, unlike the light-hearted and dismissable endings of the other Chaucerian fabliaux, the Merchant's Tale has what we will call an Act 6 of continued deception at all corners of the love triangle represented by the senex amans January, his young wife May, perhaps now pregnant after her tryst with Damyan in the pear tree, and the still present young lover Damyan. This triangle of mutual deception will continue into the unknown future under the male and female forces at odds as personified in the king and queen of fairies, Pluto and Proserpina.
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Editors of medieval texts that are translated from other languages face difficulties when the translation differs significantly from the original. Are the differences unintended, the result of misunderstanding and mistranslation\ulcorner Or do they proceed from a conscious decision on the translator's part to change the meaning of the original\ulcorner Is it possible to be sure one knows the difference\ulcorner This paper discusses three test cases encountered in preparing for the Early English Text Society a critical edition of Sidrak and Bokkus, the fifteenth-century English verse translation of the Old French prose book of knowledge, Le livre de Sidrac.
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This essay explores the theories of Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini on the language of cinema. In essays such as "The Cinema of Poetry" and "The Written Language of Reality" composed during the 1960s, Pasolini argues for the special status of film language as "pre-grammatical" and links it to visual signifying processes such as dreams and memories. He also views cinema as the inroads towards a general semiotics of reality since, for him, the basic unit of film language is not the shot but those objects of reality that constitute the mise-en-scene of the shot, hence cinema is posited as the written language of reality whose minimal units of articulation are the very objects of reality itself. Accused by semioticians such as Umberto Eco of semiotic ingenuousness in trying to reduce the facts of culture to nature, Pasolini responded by arguing that he was trying to do the opposite, that is to say, to culturalize nature by examining it as a language. Against the constructed naturalism of both commercial and neorealist films, Pasolini argued for the creation of a poetic cinema able to exploit its constitutional pre grammatical, oneiric and sacred relationship with the world. The essay concludes with an analysis of the film Medea in which Pasolini′s attempt to restore a sacred vision of reality merges with his concerns over the cultural genocide of traditional and emarginated peoples at the hands of neocapitalist homologation.
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In Origin of the German Mourning Play(1928), the critic Waltre Benjamin strongly criticized the German Romantic concept of the symbol, according to which the universal and ideal can be represented wholly in the particular and empirical by virtue of an ontological connection between them. Yet this criticism did not prevent Benjamin, in his epistemological preface to the book, from availing himself of the same monadological model (derived from Leibniz and Goethe) on which the Romantics had relied. Although he specifically rejected their insistence on the fusion of the phenomenal and the ideal in the symbol, his own theory of Ideas and their presentation in criticism nonetheless requires just such a fusion. This is not immediately apparent for two reasons: first, Benjamin proposes, in contrast to Platonic and Romantic theory, that Ideas themselves are subject to historical change, and therefore not capable of manifesting themselves fully in any given historical phenomenon; and second, he proposes that Ideas rather than phenomena are monads, individually representing the whole of the world in which they participate. The task of the critic, which Benjamin calls Darstellung("presentation"), consists in revealing Ideas by reducing historical phenomena to their constituent elements and reassembling those elements in what amounts to a mosaic of quotations. But this task is possible only if the critic has a preconception of the Idea he is trying to reveal-a possibility that Benjamin′s theory of knowledge does not allow for at all- or if he can discern the Ideas in the individual phenomenal fragments from which he creates his mosaic, in which case phenomena and Ideas must be related monadologically after all. Benjamin seems to admit the latter possibility in a cryptic sentence in the manuscript draft of his preface to the Origin, but he does not do so in the final printed version. Thus he effectively deprived the critic of an epistemological basis for the presentation of Ideas.
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Since the end of the Cold War, debate about the grand struggle between capitalism and communism has been largely replaced by debate about religious sectarianism. Some have even referred to a "clash of civilizations" in the wake of the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. This is in fact an old debate, but it has been given new life by arguments about globalization and economic development as envisioned by the West, and especially by the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001. While the political right has had little difficulty treating religious belief as a fundamental human and social interest, much of the political left has remained committed to secular Enlightenment, even when it criticizes the hegemony of the West. The dispute depends upon competing notions of history, secularism, and progress, and ultimately on the possibility or desirability of universal solidarity. While for many a world unified by one religion may no longer make sense, the old Enlightenment dream that a single version of secular and universal reason will eventually prevail over religious difference may also need to be reconsidered. The process that we call secularization is neither as singular, nor as transparent, as we might think.
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The ideal of middle class British masculinity and the representative of the new Victorian respectability, the ″gentleman″ was difficult to define amidst the class mobility and social change of the nineteenth century. Was the gentleman to be identified by class and by money\ulcorner By behavior and clothing\ulcorner By religion and morality\ulcorner This essay focuses on the problem of the ″gentleman″ as it was debated in the Victorian era and as it was reflected in the biography and work of the mid-nineteenth century's most important English writer, Charles Dickens. I examine the critical debate surrounding the Victorian idea of the ″gentleman″ by comparing the arguments of Shirley Robin Letwin's The Gentleman in Trollope(1982) and Robin Gilmour's The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel(1981). Letwin views the ″gentleman″ as largely transcending class structure, while Gilmour's more historically-conscious view locates the gentleman as emerging out of, and even enabling, the class negotiations of this period. Against the backdrop of such debates, I discuss Charles Dickens's struggles with the idea of the gentleman in theory and in practice. In his novels, especially his semi-autobiographical bildungsromane about the growth and development of boys into adulthood, Dickens prominently engages with the identity and definition of the gentleman. As I demonstrate in this essay, this interest originated from Dickens's own childhood trauma and his subsequent drive to attain gentility, a necessity complicated by the vicissitudes of his personal and professional life.
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In United States black mothers have consistently been treated as national outsiders, as women whose children, although ostensibly entitled to full citizenship, are in practice rarely provided with equal protection within the nation′s borders or under its laws. From the time he began writing in the aftermath of the failures of national Reconstruction, the African American public intellectual and political activist W. E. B. Du Bois realized that a truly effective anti-racist politics would also have to contend with the particular ways in which U.S. racism targeted black mothers. In short, he understood that an effective anti-racism would necessarily have to be a form of anti-sexism. This article examines the myriad ways in which Du Bois attempted to reconstruct the relationship between race and reproduction in the interest of producing anti-racist, anti-nationalist, as well as internationalist thinking. In so doing it treats the various representations of black maternity and child birth that Du Bois created, and elaborates on the rhetorical and political function of these representations in combating the racialization of national belonging on the one hand, and in articulating universal black citizenship, or what this article theorizes as racial globality on the other. The article begins by considering Du Bois′s attempts to transcend ideas about the racialized reproductive body as a source of national belonging within the United States, particularly his efforts to contest the idea of the reconstructing nation as a white nation reproduced exclusively by white women. Through analysis of Du Bois′s depiction of the birth and death of his son in his monumental work The Souls of Black Folk (1903) it demonstrates his reluctance to build an anti-racist politics founded on the idea that belonging within the nation is something that can be bestowed by one′s mother. The article proceeds by turning to Du Bois less well-known romantic novel, Dark Princess (1928) in which, by contrast, he depicts the birth of a "golden chi1d" who belongs not only within the United States, but within the world. This child, the son of an African American man and an Indian Princess, is cast as a messenger and messiah of a utopian alliance between pan-Asia and pan-Africa. In exploring the relationship between these two reproductive portraits, the article moves from a discussion of Du Bois′s critique of the ideological construction of the U.S. as a white nation reproduced by white progenitors, to an examination the literary figuration of a b1aek mother out of whose womb a black diasporic anti-imperialist alliance springs. In contrast to previous scholarship, which has tended to focus on the critique of U.S. racial nationalism that Du Bois expressed in his early work, or on the internationalism that he later embraced, this article pays close attention to how Du Bois′s anti-nationalist and internationalist politics together subtended by subtle, but constitutive, sexual politics.
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For the effective study of Korean modernization from the 18th century to the present, three areas have been investigated in my paper: the age of dawn in recognizing the necessity of modernism, the era of experimentation from recognition to practice, and the development of modernism in literature: from the 1930s to the present. Through whole process of discussing those matters, Koreanity- identifying itself to be Korean - has been emphasized. While the so-called traditional values confronted with the whole turmoil of socio-political demolitions in the name of modernization, westernization, and culturalization, Korean intellectuals tried to emphasize how important it was to keep Korean identities, namely the Koreanity. Such examples can be seen in the activities of Northern School and Moderate School. Though Koreans had to have a short hair cut in contradiction with their traditional morality to be modernized/westernized/cultivated, it was a turning point for them to take a step toward the international world. During the period of Korean modernization through the impact of Western world, Korean language-hangul- has been cultivated to the highest level in comparison with two foreign languages: Japanese and English. Those Korean linguists who were familiar with these two languages made Korean grammar systematic and they understood the importance of preserving Koreanity in the course of pursuing modem western society. In this sense, Korean modernism is related to the cultural glocalism(globalism+ localism), not to the cultural globalism. Through the help of socio-political modernization, Korean literature in modernism has been full bloomed in the early years of 1930s. One of the leading poets was Sang Lee whose poetic heritage is inherited by those groups of 1950s and I 960s. Among many others, Chunsu Kim and Sunghun Lee were the main figures in realizing the fact the poetry is written in Korean which they considered the body, the soul, and the mother land.
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The Contemporary Korean fiction today to a certain context infringes on the outskirts of mainstream literary theories diversified to an extent that anything and everything that are printed are defined as literature. The two fictions that the study is based upon, probably, shows the effects of postmodernism in Korean fictional 'space' in that the representation of the said fictions veers clear from that with which one might associate in contemplating the traditional Korean fiction. The study, though it seems, based on a more of a societal perspective rather than traditional literary perspective is to be noted in reference with the postmodern theories that we identity with today. The paper takes look at the changes that can be noted in the fictions: Kyung ma jang ga nun gil by Ha Il-ji and Oak tap hang by Park Sang-woo. The main objective of the paper is that it tried to identify the cultural identity of Koreans through the descriptions found in the two works. While concluding as to why these two fictions can be categorized as belonging to the genre of postmodernism the research also tries to formulate what and how postrnodernism can be discerned in fictional genre and this especially in today's Contemporary Korean fiction.
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In a recent paper, I have proposed an analysis concerning propositions and 'that'-clauses as a solution to Kripke's puzzle and other similar puzzles, which I now call 'the Indefinite Description Analysis of Belief Ascription Sentences.' I have listed some of the major advantages of this analysis besides its merit as a solution to the puzzles: it is amenable to the direct-reference theory of proper names; it does not nevertheless need to introduce Russellian (singular) propositions or any other new entities. David Lewis has constructed an interesting argument to refute this analysis. His argument seems to show that my analysis has an unwelcome consequence: if someone believes any proposition, then he or she should, ipso facto, believe any necessary (mathematical or logical) proposition (such as the proposition that 1 succeeds 0). In this paper, I argue that Lewis's argument does not pose a real threat to my analysis. All his argument shows is that we should not accept the assumption called 'the equivalence thesis': if two sentences are equivalent, then they express the same proposition. I argue that this thesis is already in trouble for independent reasons. Especially, I argue that if we accept the equivalence thesis then, even without my analysis, we can derive a sentence like 'Fred believes that 1 succeeds 0 and snow is white' from a sentence like 'Fred believes that snow is white.' The consequence mentioned above is not worse than this consequence.
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The Russian language uses more words that imply collectivism than Western Indo-European languages. In Korean, the first-person plural pronouns are used more often than in Western languages. In this respect, Russian seems to stand closer to the latter, although typologically it belongs to the Indo-European family. The predominance of 'we' over 'I,' which took place in the history of the Russian language, had something to do with the Russian commune and the ecclesiastical and spiritual concept of 'sobornost' (equation omitted). A similarity between the Russian and the Korean nations lies in a collective way of life as compared to Western nations. The Russian concepts of (equation omitted) and (equation omitted) ('commune') have direct analogues in the Korean language. In all societies a commune involves a certain sense of collectivity, or spiritual unity of the people - 'sobornost' (equation omitted). Korean collectivity is more familial and moral in character, whereas Russian 'sobornost' is more spiritual. This has its direct reflection in Korean and Russian languages. One can say that a sort of a family version of Russian 'sobornost' takes place in Korean society.
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The paper argues for the necessicity of revising many fundamental concepts that we use in everyday situations and in communication such as reality, thought, language, the world and finally the truth. The paper develops the argument that what the word ′truth′ actually signifies cannot be addressed just by explicating what philosophy, science or even religion denote but that it can only be answered fully by the study of language and therefore in a larger context linguistics. Language is the very tool that enriches the communication between one another due to its diverse significations that one may use when expressing one′s views, thereby making life more enjoyable. The paper develops why the above corresponding argument should be justified by developing three outstanding views as follows. The world or reality is indistinguishable from the common worldview that we associate with without the means of language. That the worldview is in essence inseparable from the mental and intellectual representation of it and the only means of expression lies with language. And finally, that the language is a complex signification in itself in every aspect. Language in short is the very essence of what we define as being ′poetic.′ With these arguments in mind, we may once again ponder the signification of Nietzsche′s words when he states that "to see science through the lens of art, and art through the lens of life."