Documentary film-making is one of the most vibrant areas of media activity in China, with many independent film-makers producing documentaries on a range of sensitive socio-political matters, often bringing a strongly ethical approach. This book outlines the development of documentary film-making in mainland China and Taiwan, contrasts independent documentaries with official state productions, considers the production and distribution of independent documentary film-makers, and discusses the range and content of the documentaries. The book demonstrates the success of Chinese (...) independent documentary film-making, often winning award-winning titles and appearing at international film festivals. (shrink)

In Third Digital Documentary: A Theory and Practice of Transmedia Arts Activism, Critical Design and Ethics Anita Chang offers a theory and methodology of transmedia arts activism within the technocultural and sociopolitical landscape of expanded documentary production, distribution, reception and participation. Through a detailed analysis of her transmedia project on indigenous and minority language endangerment and revival that consists of the feature-length documentary Tongues of Heaven, and the companion web application Root Tongue: Sharing Stories of (...) class='Hi'>Language Identity and Revival, she reveals the layers and depths that comprise a critical arts practice when confronted with complex sociopolitical issues while working with multiple communities across territorial/national boundaries. In the context of the growing field of transmedia documentaries, Chang discusses the potentials and benefits of a critical design practice and production ethics that can transform this field to pilot new collaborations in documentary and digital media platforms towards a third digital documentary. (shrink)

This article argues that the work of the late Johan van der Keuken offers a contribution to ecological semiotics, and that it also defines the relationship between the semiotic animal and nature in ways that avoid glottocentricism. Taking from the recent work of Kalevi Kull, Jesper Hoffmeyer, and John Deely amongst others, I will argue that van der Keuken’s documentaries offer a view of ecology that is broader than a study of bio-physical processes that might reduce ecology to a narrow (...) political issue.In order to support this argument, I will be looking at two contrasting films from van der Keuken – Flat Jungle (1978) and Face Value (1991). The first film examines natural habitats within a confined coastal area in Western Europe, while the second film looks at human beings in the different urban environments of late-20th-century Europe. I will then argue that van der Keuken does not collapse the vital distinctions between umwelt and Lebenswelt, yet his films also succeed at reminding us of their constant interdependence. (shrink)

This study draws from theoretical environmental debates as well as a selection of films, documentaries, and texts to discuss Africans’ approaches to environmental and ecological problems. Furthermore, it highlights the various strategies that Africans have developed in their attempts to provide holistic and much more comprehensive responses to environmental challenges. Informed by African indigenous knowledge, those strategies do involve community-based micro-level initiatives, grassroots organizations, ancestral spirits, and use local languages or lingua franca to educate as well as prod the people’s (...) consciousness about environmental and ecological issues. (shrink)

This book presents a chronology of thirty definitions attributed to the word, term, phrase, and concept of “documentary” between the years 1895 and 1959. The book dedicates one chapter to each of the thirty definitions, scrutinizing their idiosyncratic language games from close range while focusing on their historical roots and concealed philosophical sources of inspiration. Dan Geva's principal argument is twofold: first, that each definition is an original ethical premise of documentary; and second, that only the structured (...) assemblage of the entire set of definitions successfully depicts the true ethical nature of documentary insofar as we agree to consider its philosophical history as a reflective object of thought in a perpetual state of being-self-defined: an ethics sui generis. (shrink)

Egypt of the Hellenistic and Roman periods remains the most thoroughly documented multilingual society in the ancient world, because of the wealth of texts preserved on papyrus in Egyptian, Greek, Latin and other languages. This makes the scarcity of interpreters in the papyrological record all the more curious. This study reviews all instances in the papyri of individuals referred to as hermēneus in Greek, or references to the process of translation/interpreting. It discusses the terminological ambiguity of hermēneus, which can also (...) mean a commercial mediator; the position of language mediators in legal cases in Egyptian, Greek and Latin; the role of gender in language mediation; and concludes with a survey of interpreting in Egyptian monastic communities in Late Antiquity. (shrink)

Documentary film, in the words of Bill Nichols, is one of the "discourses of sobriety" that include science, economics, politics, and history-discourses that claim to describe the "real," to tell the truth. Yet documentary film, in more obvious ways than does history, straddles the categories of fact and fiction, art and document, entertainment and knowledge. And the visual languages with which it operates have quite different effects than does the written text. In the following interview conducted during the (...) winter of 1997, historian Ann-Louise Shapiro raises questions about genre-the relationship of form to content and meaning-with documentary filmmaker Jill Godmilow.In order to explore the possibilities and constraints of non-fiction film as a medium for representing history, Godmilow was asked: What are the strategies and techniques by which documentary films make meaning? In representing historical events, how does a non-fiction filmmaker think about accuracy? authenticity? invention? What are the criteria you have in mind when you call a film like The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl "dishonest"? How does the tension between making art and making history affect documentary filmmaking? Should documentary filmmakers think of themselves, in the phrase of Ken Burns, as "tribal storytellers"? What kind of historical consciousness is produced by documentary film? (shrink)

Documentary film, in the words of Bill Nichols, is one of the "discourses of sobriety" that include science, economics, politics, and history-discourses that claim to describe the "real," to tell the truth. Yet documentary film, in more obvious ways than does history, straddles the categories of fact and fiction, art and document, entertainment and knowledge. And the visual languages with which it operates have quite different effects than does the written text. In the following interview conducted during the (...) winter of 1997, historian Ann-Louise Shapiro raises questions about genre-the relationship of form to content and meaning-with documentary filmmaker Jill Godmilow.In order to explore the possibilities and constraints of non-fiction film as a medium for representing history, Godmilow was asked: What are the strategies and techniques by which documentary films make meaning? In representing historical events, how does a non-fiction filmmaker think about accuracy? authenticity? invention? What are the criteria you have in mind when you call a film like The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl "dishonest"? How does the tension between making art and making history affect documentary filmmaking? Should documentary filmmakers think of themselves, in the phrase of Ken Burns, as "tribal storytellers"? What kind of historical consciousness is produced by documentary film? (shrink)

The Arabic documentary papyri are precious wit- nesses to the day-to-day written Arabic of their time. These texts exhibit consider- able variation in grammar and orthography. Classical Arabic and the prescriptive attitudes of the Arabic grammarians traditionally provided the lens through which the earliest documents of the Islamic period have been read. Since Classical Ara- bic was only fully canonized in the tenth century, approaching the early Arabic papyri, and the variation attested in them, through this standard is anachronistic. (...) This article seeks to understand the language of these documents on their own terms. It employs a quantitative approach to investigate the nominal case system, focusing on the form of ʾab in construct, producing a fine-grained analysis of how inflection operated in early documentary Arabic, and attempts to account for points of divergence within a historical and sociolinguistic framework. (shrink)

To take a structural approach to genealogy means dealing with it as a story written in a language that is unknown and yet to be deciphered. It is the very language of time—individual and familial—in which a human being situates, often in a striking manner, the principal life and death events of his own destiny. Or better perhaps, it means discovering this in genealogies, which must first be exhumed from the dusty cabinets where a solid and excessively (...) class='Hi'>documentary tradition has too long confined them, in order to consider them now, in a sense, as venerable “black boxes”, potentially containing secrets of the intimate functioning of families, capable of providing unknown information on this subject, with meaning and logic winning out over the apparent fantasy with which they have been coated. (shrink)

The Spoken Image considers the nature of photography, examining the language used in titles, captions and commentaries, particularly as they relate to documentary photography, photojournalism and fashion photography.

Part personal documentary, part exercise in medical semantics, this essay brings the analytical tools of a linguist and the human perspective of a patient receiving treatment in the American health care system to bear on the language we use—for the most part unconsciously—to talk about illness and disease. Topics to be explored include linguistic ramifications of the illness/disease distinction; referring expressions for health disorders; the “linguistic construction” of disease (what's in a name?); the “translation” of biomedical information from (...) the specialists' dialect into everyday idiom; and the metaphoric/symbolic dimension of body-parts and their afflictions. (shrink)

First published in 1982. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The papers collected in this volume exemplify some of the trends in current approaches to logic, language and computation. Written by authors with varied academic backgrounds, the contributions are intended for an interdisciplinary audience. The first part of this volume addresses issues relevant for multi-agent systems: reasoning with incomplete information, reasoning about knowledge and beliefs, and reasoning about games. Proofs as formal objects form the subject of Part II. Topics covered include: contributions on logical frameworks, linear logic, and different (...) approaches to formalized reasoning. Part III focuses on representations and formal methods in linguistic theory, addressing the areas of comparative and temporal expressions, modal subordination, and compositionality. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it tries to analyze and sistematize some of the concepts used when approaching the linguislic problems concerning the legal documentation automatic systems: legal language, documentary language, linguistic coordination (a priori and a posteriori) and thesaurus. On the other hand, it intends to carry out a detailed study of the legal thesauri, focusingbasicany on its t wo structural elements: the vocabulary and the paradigmatic relationships.

Some initial considerations on film in documentary form are discussed, along with its relationships with reality and fiction in cinema language. Found footage genre is explained, pointing its most important technical and aesthetical characteristics. The text points the importance of the movie camera in documentary and found footage, not only as a technical device that objectivizes the information in a static manner, but also as an axis that configures dynamism and subjectivity on films. Redacted (2007) by Brian (...) De Palma is analyzed as an example of hybrid forms of fiction and reality in cinema. Beyond a traditional analysis of narrative of films, this text emphasizes the forms in which they are developed, which affect and determine the substance of films. (shrink)

In her 2011 documentary, La Langue de Zahra/Zahra’s Mother Tongue, Algerian/French filmmaker Fatima Sissani “gives voice” to her Kabyle mother, Zahra, who lived in France as an immigrant woman for years after Algerian independence without speaking French. Often considered uneducated and ignorant, these women act as archives of oral tradition, history, and poetry in a language their children often do not speak. In this paper, I will look at how this performative documentary film creates “spaces in-between” cultures (...) through its uses of performance, orality, and cinematic space. A number of recent Maghrebi and sub-Saharan African documentaries have emerged that can be described as performative documentaries in which historical evocation and emotive connection to the subject matter is as important to the filmmaker as factual referencing. The filmmaker plays a self-reflexive role in the text, which often shapes the content.It is important to note that the film is not about being forced to choose between two ge... (shrink)

Through a historical and documentary analysis, I investigate the possible perceptions and influences that Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz could have had by her exposure to the incipient cultural and social movements at the time of the viceroyalty in New Spain. Throughout her work, she refers to Spain and New Spain. From the first, she collects the literary tradition and transforms it, dedicates poems to the representatives of the monarchy and recognizes her own Spanish heritage; from the second, (...) she collects the Nahua language, Mexican Spanish and the echo of other languages. This agglutination is the result of an integral and conciliatory vision. The work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is a mirror of a modernity underpinned by a proposal of equity, of joint traditions articulated in the prodigy of the word and creative freedom. (shrink)

This study offers a close reading of China’s Van Goghs, a documentary that tells the personal story of Zhao Xiaoyong, a painter-worker making his living by replicating masterpieces in a Chinese art village. Taking the cinematic representation of Zhao’s pilgrimage as a starting point, this study explores how the meaning of authenticity is negotiated through the interplay between aesthetic value and market value in the global flow of cultural products. Through a cross-disciplinary exchange between film, tourism, urban studies and (...) creative labor studies, this study investigates the on-screen portrayal of places, people and power relations as a means to investigate the spatial, social and political implications of Zhao’s journey. Situating the protagonist’s quest for authenticity in Shenzhen’s transition from a labor-intensive economy to a knowledge-based economy, this study sheds light on the intersection between identity, mobility, and creativity at the time of capitalization, urbanization and globalization. (shrink)

Ontology development methodologies emphasise knowledge gathering from domain experts and documentary resources, and knowledge representation using an ontology language such as OWL or FOL. However, working ontologists are often surprised by how challenging and slow it can be to develop ontologies. Here, with a particular emphasis on the sorts of ontologies that are content-heavy and intended to be shared across a community of users (reference ontologies), we propose that a significant and heretofore under-emphasised contributor of challenges during ontology (...) development is the need to create, or bring about, consensus in the face of disagreement. For this reason reference ontology development cannot be automated, at least within the limitations of existing AI approaches. Further, for the same reason ontologists are required to have specific social-negotiating skills which are currently lacking in most technical curricula. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to reveal philosophical ideas in the mythology and folklore of the indigenous peoples of North America. An important question: "Can we assume that the spiritual culture of the American Indians contained philosophical knowledge?" remains relevant today. For example, European philosophy is defined by appeals to philosophers of the past, their texts. The philosophical tradition is characterized by rational argumentation and formulation of philosophical questions that differ from the questions of ordinary language. However, the (...) problem lies in the term "philosophy", which belongs to the so-called "philosophical untranslatability" and has many definitions. The question of whether philosophy is exclusively a phenomenon of European culture is still controversial. In the article, the concept of philosophy is used in a broad sense, which allows the analysis of the intellectual heritage of the culture of the indigenous people of North America for philosophical ideas. Theoretical basis of the study consists of primary sources, which are limited due to the "documentary horizon". It contains myths about the Twins, ritual rhetoric, examples of dream interpretation practices and the practical wisdom of tribal chiefs. The Chronicle of "Vallamolum", or "the Red List", testifies to the special idea of the Indians about history and their own historicity. Analysis of cosmogonical and cosmological ideas reveals the special features of the anthropological ideas of the North American Indians. Combined with the philosophical ideas of the Puritan philosophy of the settlers of New England, this analysis allows us to explore in more detail the processes of acculturation. The study uses critical literature from scholars and leading researchers of the wisdom and philosophy of Native Americans, such as Michael Yellow Bird, J. Baird Callicott, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dennis H. McPherson, Lewis Henri Morgan, Thomas M. Norton-Smith, J. Douglas Rabb, Paul Radin, Jon Ewbank Manchip White. The views of early American philosophers: R. Williams, W. Penn, R. W. Emerson, on the problem of the relationship between the culture of settlers and the indigenous people of North America are noteworthy. Originality lies in the application of historical and philosophical methodology, identifying the features of philosophizing in the spiritual culture and worldview of the indigenous people of North America. Conclusions. In the conclusions, the obtained results complement the history of the origin and development of philosophical thought of the early American philosophy. (shrink)

Using limpid language and citing abundant documentary evidence, the two authors demonstrate two fundamental and closely interconnected theses. The first is that Frege in no wise influenced Husserl in the manner and to the extent believed by many analytic philosophers. The second is that Husserl’s logical ideas were formally, ontologically and cognitively more advanced than Frege’s.

Assessing the quality of translation is never straightforward and rarely objective. Context, audience, text type, function and lexis are only some of the criteria that need to be taken into account. In the case of constrained intersemiotic translation, subtitling being a prime example thereof, determining universal criteria for assessment is particularly testing. Often referred to as “necessary evil”, audiovisual translation needs to avoid distracting the audience, while aiding their comprehension of the audiovisual message. This is particularly the case for additive (...) AVT, for instance subtitling, where the translation does not replace the original, but coexists with it. Relevance Theory, a controversial but flexible approach to communication, may provide a viable framework for gauging subtitling quality. The interplay between relevance, communicative intention and processing effort can help explain the rationale behind the process of decision-making in the practice of AVT. This paper provides a theoretical foundation for the application of Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory to interlingual subtitling, followed by an analysis of selected examples from a large corpus of mostly English-language movies, series and documentaries streamed on Netflix with Polish subtitles. Though the corpus is Polish-centred, the research conclusions are intended to be universal enough to apply regardless of the language pair. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.1 (2001) 17-35 [Access article in PDF] Late Antiquity and the Florentine Renaissance: Historiographical Parallels Christopher S. Celenza Aulus Gellius, at the end of the second century, shows us the type of writer who was destined to prevail, the compiler. In his Noctes Atticae he compiles without method or even without any definite end in view.... After him there is only barrenness. The (...) third century is a literary Sahara.... Thoughtless admiration for mathematics keeps up or reintroduces the mentality of magic.... In the fourth century ad Iamblichus had his brain almost turned by the science of numbers. 1 --Ferdinand Lot The rapid progress of humanism after the year 1400 paralyzed native impulses. Henceforth men looked only to antiquity for the solution of every problem, and consequently allowed literature to sink into mere quotation. 2 --Jacob Burckhardt Various aspects of late antiquity in western Europe and the Florentine Renaissance bear certain similarities which, if properly examined and contextualized, can lead to a deeper understanding of both periods--of their social as well as intellectual significance, of the manner in which politics relates to culture, and [End Page 17] of the relationship between urban life in a specific sort of milieu to the mechanisms of religious and philosophical dynamism. 3 The parallels are not always exact, but various underlying patterns are present. Here the main line of argument will be that a number of aspects of late ancient thought and of Renaissance thought (especially Renaissance Latin literature of all genres) went ignored by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars, thanks to certain underlying assumptions concerning what was appropriate to investigate. These assumptions were themselves related to the combination of two major factors: romantic essentializing ideas about the nature of language, inherited from the Enlightenment, and the development in the nineteenth century of nationalist, evolutionary historiographies. The results of these developments persisted into the twentieth century and can be seen to an extent even today. Nationalist Historiographies and the Problem of Language "Gentlemen, nations are thoughts of God." So Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) used to begin his history courses in Berlin, as Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97) later remembered. 4 While Ranke himself was concerned primarily with documentary history and the evolution of the modern state, he was also part of a larger trend in the German speaking world which sought to identify, in the study of the past, the spirit, or Geist, of a given era or people, a project which had been theorized by Hegel. Ranke and others, like Johann Gustav Droysen and August Böckh, taking their point of departure from Barthold Niebuhr and, more immediately, from Wilhelm von Humboldt, saw themselves as self-consciously transcending Hegel, basing their ideas on documentary sources as opposed to a priori theorizing. 5 But certain assumptions were similar, none more so than presuppositions relating to the Volksgeist. It is not that Ranke was relentlessly teleological; [End Page 18] history was made in the process of the unfolding of events. His primary mission was the documenting and understanding of modernity, a task which, despite their later divergences in practice, Burckhardt shared. 6 The goal was, following Niebuhr's approach in classical studies, to present history in an appealing way and in a manner useful to modernity. 7 This was bound up with a larger set of movements, encompassing the search for national identity and a tendency toward locating essential characteristics of a "people." 8 One of these characteristics was language, and a central preoccupation of scholars became the manner in which culture expressed itself through language, even as philology was becoming "the first historical discipline, the model for all other historical sciences" and the general view of scholarly fields as separate, specialized entities was growing. 9In their concern with language as a vehicle for cultural transmission and as a defining characteristic of a people, nineteenth-century scholars were the heirs of the Enlightenment. Ideas of a plurality of cultures had flourished; as it was put in the Encyclopédie, language expressed the "genius of a people." If... (shrink)

In "Literary Variation of Indian Buddhist Stories in Chinese 志怪 Novels," Wei Guo discusses Buddhist Sutra scriptures which have been a reservoir of inspiration for Zhiguai novels since their first introduction in Chinese literature. Buddhist texts were less relevant for the "documentary" tradition of Chinese literature owing to their rough structure, vague context, and lack of a sense of history and reality, since they were originally intended as texts of didacticism. Hence, in order to integrate these exotic literary materials (...) with local aesthetic concepts, Chinese writers explored creative adaptations including the addition of adding detail, linguistic embellishments, and the endowment of each story with specific narrative scenes in terms of character, place, and time. Guo argues that Indian Buddhist stories have been remolded in Zhiguai novels and transformed from imaginary religious literature into figurative and documentary literature whereby the convergence of the source texts with the target texts shows the processes of formation of world literature. (shrink)

The article defines a new referential problem of ethnographic description: the verbalization of the "silent" dimension of the social. As a documentary procedure, description has been devalued by more advanced recording techniques that set a naturalistic standard concerning the reification of qualitative "data." I discuss this standard from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge and replace it by a challenge unknown to all empirical procedures relying on primary verbalizations of informants. Descriptions have to solve the problems of the (...) voiceless, the silent, the unspeakable, the pre-linguistic, and the indescribable. Ethnography puts something into words, which did not exist in language before. To respond to this task, descriptions have to turn away from the logic of recording and develop into a theory-oriented research practice. (shrink)

A content analysis of the Qur’an shows that it lays utmost importance on the realization of justice and conversely the eradication of injustice in society. A historicalanalysis found that social justice was prevalent in Mecca under the leadership of Prophet Muhammad and was also practiced during the period of the first fourrightly guided caliphs (Khulafa-e-rashidun). Since then, the successive Muslim majority states have not taken the issue of social justice seriously. These states have failed in taking an active role in (...) uplifting the ethical and moral standards of society. The documentary analysis of the existing 49 states in the Muslim world found majority of these states to have deviated from the real spirit of Islamic social justice falling within the category of “failed states.”. (shrink)

The ongoing duel between realist and anti-realist tendencies in film theory usually positions the ideas of André Bazin unambiguously on the realist side. Whatever else we expect to find in his writing – and the current resurgence is finding more and more – we should find this: realism, cinematic realism. But what type of realism? Is it ontological, and, if so, is it based on a claim for the primacy of photography's “analogical” relation to the world, even to the point (...) of a “direct contact” with the physical existence of nature? Is it aesthetic, celebrating depth of field? Unaffected mise-en-scène? The documentary impulse in preference to fantasy or artifice? In this article, however, I want to argue that we must expand the definition of Bazinian realism through its sensitivity to the non-human. The terrain of the cinematic “Real” is inhabited by a singular complex, one that includes physical space, animality, and material objects, as well as persons and events. To shift our attention to these elements and their effects – intimate as well as alienating, familiar as well as jarring and unexpected – offers another way to glimpse the Real. Which is not to say that the socially constituted world drops out. Of course, language, gender and culture are inescapable mediations. Yet they are, in a certain sense, all wrought by a transcendent human hand. Bazin's conception of realism provides access to a space that is less anthropocentric and testifies to an immanence of the Real, such that non-human, objective realism is not about capturing reality in toto but registering the fact that the human is only a part of reality. There are realities beyond human subjectivity – in space, in objects, in animality – realities that we are put in contact with by cinema. Ideally, what cinema makes possible is an equality, a democratic freedom, not merely for the human spectator – to view and explore film worlds – but for the viewed “object” too: a democracy of the viewer-viewed that installs intersubjectivity in the Real. (shrink)

The article defines a new referential problem of ethnographic description: the verbalization of the “silent” dimension of the social. As a documentary procedure, description has been devalued by more advanced recording techniques that set a naturalistic standard concerning the reification of qualitative “data.” I discuss this standard from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge and replace it by a challenge unknown to all empirical procedures relying on primary verbalizations of informants. Descriptions have to solve the problems of the (...) voiceless, the silent, the unspeakable, the pre-linguistic, and the indescribable. Ethnography puts something into words, which did not exist in language before. To respond to this task, descriptions have to turn away from the logic of recording and develop into a theory-oriented research practice. (shrink)

Early artistic and aesthetic pluralism is not an accidental phenomenon in Polish aesthetic theories. This article shows its nineteenth and twentieth century origins and various theoretical considerations, and brings to the foreground the philosophical motifs entangled in the historical events of Poland. Cited documentary material focuses on two selected topics. They are: the philosophized version of history, in particular the multicultural history of aesthetics and the extended categorization of the active site of subjectivity.

A translator and her science consultant, who have worked together on many books, consider the problems of translating primary and secondary texts in science. Various problems encountered in translating an ongoing documentary edition in the history of science are discussed using the collected works of Albert Einstein as a test case. For instance, each language has its own preferred sentence structure; moreover, not every historical term finds a perfect equivalent in modern usage, and historical accuracy is contextually bounded.

Why did the Greeks of the Roman period make such extensive use of the vocative kurie, when Greeks of earlier periods had been content with only one vocative meaning ¿master¿, despota? This study, based primarily on a comprehensive search of documentary papyri but also making extensive use of literary evidence (particularly that of the Septuagint and New Testament), traces the development of both terms from the classical period to the seventh century ad. It concludes that kurie was created to (...) provide a translation for Latin domine, and that domine, which has often been considered a translation of kurie, had a Roman origin. In addition, both kurie and domine were from their beginnings much less deferential than is traditionally supposed, so that neither term underwent the process of ¿weakening¿ which converted English ¿master¿ into ¿Mr¿. despota, which was originally far more deferential than the other two terms, did undergo some weakening, but not (until a very late period) as much as is usually supposed. These findings in turn imply that Imperial politeness has been somewhat misunderstood and suggest that the Greeks of the first few centuries ad were much less servile in their language than is traditionally assumed. (shrink)

On the analogy of the colloquial register in some modern languages, where narrative and argument may be punctuated by oaths and exclamations in order to maintain a high affective level and compel the hearer's attention, it is reasonable to postulate that Attic conversation also was punctuated by oaths, that this ingredient in comic language was drawn from life, and that the comparative frequency of ║ M M Δ in comedy is sufficiently explained thereby. There are obvious affinities between some (...) passages of comedy, relaxed conversation in Plato and Xenophon, and the forceful, man-to-man tone which Demosthenes sometimes adopts to such good effect . Compare, for instance, Ar. V. 133 f. στιν δ' νομα ⋮ τ μν γέροντι ⋮ Φιλοκλέων / να μ Δία, τ δ' υε κτλ., where the oath is a response to imagined incredulity, and X. Smp. 4.27 ατν δ σέ, η, γ εδον να μ τν πόλλω, τε κτλ. . It is also important that the commonest oaths fit, in most of their forms, the end of an iambic trimeter: μ τν Δία, ν Δία,ν τούς θεούς, μ τος θεούς. Add that in Aristophanic dialogue over half the iambic trimeters end with major pause, and half the remainder with minor pause, and we can see why Δ / established itself early as a distinctive comic pattern. Out of 105 examples of M M Δ cited from comedy in Section II above, 59 have the oath at verse-end. In the case of πάνυ, which was almost exclusively Attic and — to judge from its great rarity in tragedy — felt by Athenian poets to be prosaic, we lack evidence on its functions in the colloquial register; it may or may not have served as affective punctuation. In prose, we have to reckon with the fact that π Mπ and Mπ π constituted a genuine stylistic choice as far back as the evidence will take us, since the two earliest instances in prose are [X.] Ath. 2.3 πάνυ δι χρείαν and ibid. 3.5 πολλ τι πάνυ. The oath, as treated by the comic poets on the basis of colloquial usage, is bound to have served as a model for πάνυ, exerting an influence which pulled πάνυ to the end of the verse, but there was also a powerful metrical constraint. As a dibrach ending in a vowel which could not be elided or enter into crasis, πάνυ was especially appropriate for verse-end. That in itself was enough both to establish Mπ π as the dominant pattern in comedy and to promote Mπ … π. Out of the total of 104 examples of Mπ π in comedy, 93 have πάνυ at verse-end, which makes Mπ π / one of the hallmarks of comic style. Mπ … π does not occur in prose in association with any other feature identified as colloquial, but it should be noted that Aiskhines and Demosthenes are much fonder of Mπ π than other prose authors. In some cases one can see that the order Mπ π avoids a succession of short syllables or hiatus or both , but there are other cases in which it has the opposite effect . The possibility of comic influence on oratorical language cannot be dismissed out of hand. It is also possible that someone will find positive determinants which will explain all the cases of Mπ π in prose. σόδρα, which, like πάνυ, is peculiarly Attic, is metrically more tractable than πάνυ, since it can be elided; even so, out of the 80 comic examples of Mσ σ no less than 58 have σόδρα at verse-end, and of those 58 there are 22 at major pause, 8 at presumed major pause and 9 at minor pause. The comic treatment of σόδρα is thus comparable with the treatment of πάνυ, and Timokles 222.4 τηρεν…σόδρα is in fact the closest analogy we have to Ar. Pl. 234 f. χθομαι…πάνυ. δέ and γάρ are a different matter, and in some significant respects different from each other. Postponement of δέ is especially prominent in Aeschylus and then abundant in fourth-century comedy. It is much less common in Euripides , rare in Sophocles and Aristophanes , and virtually limited in prose to the categories which I labelled –. There is as yet no evidence to associate postponement of δέ with colloquial language; on the contrary, it seems to have begun as a feature of poetic language and to have been taken up and exploited by fourth-century comedy. If, in addition to being Aeschylean, it was colloquial in the fourth century, what happened to it afterwards? Except for such an isolated and inexplicable case as Diod. xx85.1 — in a military narrative — it is not a feature of the Koine at literary, documentary or subliterate level. Postponement of γάρ was no doubt encouraged by postponement of δέ, but it is not itself notably poetic ). One can see how it could possibly have developed in the spoken language of the fourth century, extending the function of γάρ as an explanatory particle in a way which makes it comparable with the English ‘you see’ in ‘He didn't dare pick it up. He hurt his back last year, you see’. For an extension of this kind we may compare the current extension of the English genitive affix in ‘Then the girl whose place she was taking's mother turned up’ and ‘The man that Christopher liked's Introduction is much better’. Moreover, postponed γάρ appears in a segment of conversation constructed in indirect speech by Theophrastus in Char. 8.9 τ πργμα βοσθαι γάρ . Again we must ask: what happened to it afterwards? A couple of cases in Theophrastus' botanical works could be a reflex of the influence of comedy on literary language at Athens. The influence was plainly short-lived, since it did not affect the Koine. It is not hard to see why serious poetry in the fifth century and earlier should have experimented occasionally with the postponement of δέ and γάρ: treatment of M M q as a valid alternative to M q M is metrically very convenient. No poet, however, could afford to use common words in a bizarre, un-Greek way merely to save himself time and trouble in constructing a verse. Linguistic innovation is normally analogical, proceeding by extension from a starting-point already there, and the most obvious starting-point for postponement of δέ and γάρ is constituted by my class . This consideration provides comic postponement with a pedigree, but does not deny it individuality. The remarkable scale and frequency with which comedy exploited a phenomenon which tragedy used with restraint and prose hardly at all gives comic postponement the right to be regarded as a quite distinctive artificial feature of comedy. (shrink)

On the analogy of the colloquial register in some modern languages, where narrative and argument may be punctuated by oaths and exclamations (sometimes obscene or blasphemous) in order to maintain a high affective level and compel the hearer's attention, it is reasonable to postulate that Attic conversation also was punctuated by oaths, that this ingredient in comic language was drawn from life, and that the comparative frequency of ║ (|)M M(M) Δ in comedy is sufficiently explained thereby. There are (...) obvious affinities between some passages of comedy, relaxed conversation in Plato and Xenophon, and the forceful, man-to-man tone which Demosthenes sometimes adopts to such good effect (e.g. xxi 209). Compare, for instance, Ar.V.133 f.ἔστιν δ' ⋯νομα ⋮ τῷ μ⋯ν γέροντι ⋮ Φιλοκλέων / να⋯ μ⋯ Δία, τῷ δ' υἱεῖ κτλ., where the oath is a response to imagined incredulity, and X.Smp.4.27αὐτ⋯ν δ⋯ σέ, ἔɸη, ⋯γὼ εἶδον να⋯ μ⋯ τ⋯ν Ἀπόλλω, ὅτε κτλ. (‘Oh, yes, I did!’).It is also important that the commonest oaths fit, in most of their forms, the end of an iambic trimeter:(να⋯) μ⋯ τ⋯ν Δία, ν⋯ (τ⋯ν) Δία,ν⋯ τούς θεούς, μ⋯ τοὺς θεούς. Add that in Aristophanic dialogue (by contrast with Menander) over half the iambic trimeters end with major pause, and half the remainder with minor pause, and we can see why Δ / established itself early as a distinctive comic pattern. Out of 105 examples ofM M(M) Δ cited from comedy in Section II above, 59 have the oath at verse-end.In the case ofπάνυ, which was almost exclusively Attic and — to judge from its great rarity in tragedy — felt by Athenian poets to be prosaic, we lack evidence on its functions in the colloquial register; it may or may not have served as affective punctuation. In prose, we have to reckon with the fact thatπ MπandMππconstituted a genuine stylistic choice (cf. n. 32) as far back as the evidence will take us, since the two earliest instances in prose are [X.]Ath.2.3πάνυ δι⋯ χρείανand ibid. 3.5πολλ⋯ ἔτι πάνυ. The oath, as treated by the comic poets on the basis of colloquial usage, is bound to have served as a model forπάνυ, exerting an influence which pulledπάνυto the end of the verse, but there was also a powerful metrical constraint. As a dibrach ending in a vowel which could not be elided or enter into crasis,πάνυwas especially appropriate for verse-end. That in itself was enough both to establishMππas the dominant pattern in comedy and to promoteMπ…π. Out of the total of 104 examples ofMπ(…)πin comedy, 93 haveπάνυat verse-end, which makesMπ(…)π/ one of the hallmarks of comic style.Mπ…πdoes not occur in prose in association with any other feature identified as colloquial, but it should be noted that Aiskhines and Demosthenes are much fonder ofMππthan other prose authors. In some cases one can see that the orderMππavoids a succession of short syllables (e.g. D. xviii 130, liv 1) or hiatus (e.g. D. xxx 36) or both (e.g. D. xliii 10), but there are other cases in which it has the opposite effect (e.g. D. xxiv 140, xliii 53). The possibility of comic influence on oratorical language cannot be dismissed out of hand. It is also possible that someone will find positive determinants which will explain all the cases ofMππin prose.σɸόδρα, which, likeπάνυ, is peculiarly Attic, is metrically more tractable thanπάνυ, since it can be elided; even so, out of the 80 comic examples ofMσ(…) σ no less than 58 haveσɸόδραat verse-end, and of those 58 there are 22 at major pause, 8 at presumed major pause and 9 at minor pause. The comic treatment ofσɸόδραis thus comparable with the treatment ofπάνυ, and Timokles (CGFP) 222(b).4τηρεῖν…σɸόδραis in fact the closest analogy we have to Ar.Pl.234 f.ἄχθομαι…πάνυ.δέandγάρare a different matter, and in some significant respects different from each other. Postponement ofδέis especially prominent in Aeschylus (45 examples, including a few in which the text is suspect) and then abundant in fourth-century comedy. It is much less common in Euripides (18 examples), rare in Sophocles (6) and Aristophanes (6), and virtually limited in prose to the categories which I labelled (l)–(3). There is as yet no evidence to associate postponement ofδέwith colloquial language; on the contrary, it seems to have begun as a feature of poetic language and to have been taken up and exploited by fourth-century comedy. If, in addition to being Aeschylean, it was colloquial in the fourth century, what happened to it afterwards? Except for such an isolated and inexplicable case as Diod. xx85.1 (v.l.!) — in a military narrative — it is not a feature of the Koine at literary, documentary or subliterate level.Postponement ofγάρwas no doubt encouraged by postponement ofδέ, but it is not itself notably poetic (20 examples in tragedy, of which only three come in my class (5)). One can see how it could possibly have developed in the spoken language of the fourth century, extending the function ofγάρas an explanatory particle (rather on the lines ofγε) in a way which makes it comparable with the English ‘you see’ in (e.g.) ‘He didn't dare pick it up. He hurt his back last year, you see’. For an extension of this kind we may compare the current extension of the English genitive affix in (I heard both examples a year or two ago) ‘Then the girl whose place she was taking's mother turned up’ and ‘The man that Christopher liked's Introduction is much better’. Moreover, postponedγάρappears in a segment of conversation constructed in indirect speech by Theophrastus inChar.8.9τ⋯ πρ⋯γμα βο⋯σθαι γάρ(p C N γάρ). Again we must ask: what happened to it afterwards? A couple of cases in Theophrastus' botanical works (CPiii 11.3 andHPiv 6.1) could be a reflex of the influence of comedy on literary language at Athens. The influence was plainly short-lived, since it did not affect the Koine.It is not hard to see why serious poetry in the fifth century and earlier should have experimented occasionally with the postponement ofδέandγάρ: treatment ofM M qas a valid alternative toM q Mis metrically very convenient. No poet, however, could afford to use common words in a bizarre, un-Greek way merely to save himself time and trouble in constructing a verse. Linguistic innovation is normally analogical, proceeding by extension from a starting-point already there, and the most obvious starting-point for postponement ofδέandγάρis constituted by my class (3). This consideration provides comic postponement with a pedigree, but does not deny it individuality. The remarkable scale and frequency with which comedy exploited a phenomenon which tragedy used with restraint and prose hardly at all gives comic postponement the right to be regarded as a quite distinctive artificial feature of comedy. (shrink)

Late nineteenth‐century public museums in the United States were intentionally built to be modern, guided by administrators like George Brown Goode toward scientific goals that included preservation, research, and education. Self‐consciously preoccupied with the management of museums, intent on attaining mastery over the objects that constituted their museums, and persuaded that meaning derived not just from the objects themselves but from their explanation and configuration by experts, museum masters led a “new museum” movement. A century later, the critiques of postmodern (...) scholars attest to the museum directors’ effective establishment of a modern profile. Historians of science, who once could take these institutions for granted as a lightly marked center of authority, now may use methods of social and cultural studies to open their institutional and intellectual frames. While cautious about theory‐driven arguments, such scholars benefit from the issues raised by cultural critics even as they rely on their own documentary methods to ensure that science is an integral component when examining ideas, language, and practice in context. (shrink)

Michel Foucault (1926–84) invented a new practice of philosophy. His books trace the emergence of some of the concepts, institutions, and techniques of government which delineate the peculiar shape of modern European culture. They include a history of madness, an account of the birth of clinical medicine at the end of the eighteenth century, an archaeology of the modern sciences of language, life, and labor, a genealogy of the modern form of punishment, and fragments of a history of sexuality. (...) These are all historical studies by virtue of the kinds of claim advanced and the documentary evidence adduced to illustrate and support them, but they do not conform to established rules of historiographical method and often invent new objects of historical research. The title chosen by Foucault for the chair he occupied at the Collège de France provides a clue to the distinctive nature of his research: professor of the history of systems of thought. By “thought” he means firstly the forms of theoretical and conceptual reflection developed within philosophy and the human sciences. His early work deals with the history of psychopathology and clinical medicine in a manner which owes much to the approach of French philosopher‐historians of science such as Bachelard and Canguilhem. However, by “thought” Foucault also means the forms of rationality embedded in the everyday practice of administrators, doctors, priests, and private individuals, and expressed in technical manuals, projects for institutional reform, and the writings of moralists. His work on madness, criminal punishment, and sexuality exposes the historical singularity of forms of experience which involve thought in both of these senses. The history of systems of thought thus defines an approach to the workings of a culture rather than a specific level within a given culture. (shrink)