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This article aims to examine Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy's Ballet mécanique (1924), focusing on its response to technological modernity. Firstly, it assesses the film's 'Purist' leanings, and especially the notion that it provides moments of reprieve from the perceptual shock that typifies modern urban life. Following this, it provides a close examination of the relationship between the human and the machine in the film, considering whether it seeks to write out the human in favour of the mechanical, or to reconfigure the human with the model of the machine in mind. Finally, the article considers other 'mechanisms' at work in the film – the cinematic apparatus and the human psyche – and the figure of 'Charlot' (Charlie Chaplin) as an emblem of these. It ultimately suggests that Léger is mobilising some of the techniques of the earlier 'cinema of attractions' in order to capture anxieties around the effects of machine culture on the human beings living under its regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1847, one of the first professors of Dutch, Matthijs Siegenbeek (1774–1854), published a purist word list entitled Lijst van woorden en uitdrukkingen met het Nederlandsch taaleigen strijdende, 'List of words and expressions at odds with the nature of Dutch'. In this pamphlet, he condemned a variety of loanwords and loan translations. Siegenbeek refers regularly to the usage of disapproved variants, employing a variety of quantifiers and sociolinguistic references. How well such statements reflect the linguistic reality, however, is a contentious issue in studies of prescriptivism. In this paper, we study Siegenbeek's pronouncements about usage against the backdrop of Curzan's concept of restorative prescriptivism. By studying the use of different types of quantifiers, and matching these to a text collection of historical fiction from the time, we show that Siegenbeek's statements about usage miss the mark for most specific variables. However, when we look at the average usage frequency, we see that as frequency terms increase in strength, so do the number of condemned variants, both for relative frequency and absolute frequency. Based on these results, we argue for a re-evaluation of the relationship between prescriptivism and usage, and a reappreciation of prescriptivists' frequency judgements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like many authors in the early seventeenth century, the Dutch poet and prose writer Gerbrand Bredero prided himself on his defence of the mother tongue. The main reason for Bredero’s preference can be found in his consideration for the ‘unlearned’ public, perhaps to be associated with his being ‘unlearned’ himself. In his appreciation of the mother tongue, he closely responds to predecessors like Dirck Coornhert and Hendrik Spiegel. Moreover, he shared ideas about purism and ‘language building’ with the leading voices of the Amsterdam chamber of rhetoric, of which Bredero was a member. In this article, it will be shown how and to what extent linguistic aspects of Bredero’s prose are in line with his Amsterdam predecessors. Some of the imagery used by Bredero fits in with the idiom of Coornhert, while Spiegel’s writing exemplified the use of innovative compound words and genitives. Though Bredero is far less extreme in his experimentation with both forms, he did not refrain from leaving his own creative mark on language use, as a supposed result of a direct and active focus on common, Amsterdam burghers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we provide a systematic study of the extent and influence of the ideology of purism in Afrikaans historical linguistics. The study takes the form of a critical discourse analysis that indicates how the nationalistic, puristic ideologies of Apartheid were transferred – implicitly and explicitly – to linguistic descriptions of the history of Afrikaans. We firstly engage in a discussion of purism – specifically genetic and sanitary purism – and the role of nationalism in linguistic purism. We then divide the historical linguists of Afrikaans into three categories that do not correspond to certain periods very strictly, but follow a chronological order to some extent: the pre-philological, philological, and alternative schools of thought. Finally, we trace how Afrikaans historical linguistics practiced significant erasure in the name of purism at first, transferring certain aspects of nationalism and purism to scientific inquiry, to then become less puristic and more inclusive with time, as is especially the case with the alternative school of thought. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The status of Amazigh/Berber language and identity in Morocco has provoked multiple debates in recent years, including a debate on unifying the three main Amazigh varieties (Tashelhit, Tamazight, and Tarifit) into one standard language. This study discusses how the Amazigh language standardisation is socially constructed and profoundly connected to notions of identity, differentiation, and a pan-Amazigh imaginary. Few studies have analysed these sociolinguistic underpinnings within the framework of language ideologies. Most of these studies focus on activists working on Amazigh language issues. Drawing on theories of language ideologies and discourse analysis, this study investigates the process of Amazigh standardisation based on the views of both activists and non-activists, and discusses the social implications of this process. Informed by onsite fieldwork including questionnaire surveys and interviews, the study reveals a wide opinion divide, based on practicalities and language ideologies, between the country's Amazigh activists and non-activists. Of equal importance, the study shows that Amazigh standardisation presents a case of linguistic erasure, which negatively affects native varieties at risk of losing their local intimate qualities as mother tongues. The outcome of this study is relevant not only to Morocco, but also to other North African nations where Amazigh language issues have been drawn into social and political conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the work of a Language Commission set by the Faroese Government in 2005 to formulate a proposal for an official Faroese language policy and findings from my own study on language use among young Faroe Islanders, this paper questions whether the present language policy in the Faroes is an effective strategy to maintain and protect a demographically small language - like Faroese - as a viable language. The findings of this study indicate a conflict between a purist movement that wants to police the Faroese language and actual language use. The findings also suggest that even if one lives in a linguistically fairly homogenous situation, in remote areas, multilingualism is a necessity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was David Lodge who began encouraging critics in the 1960s to consider the ways in which literary devices from the past are often revived through the very practice of formal innovation. At the time, Lodge suggested that it's more productive to think of the contemporary novel as ‘a new synthesis of pre-existing narrative traditions, rather than a continuation of one of them or an entirely unprecedented phenomenon’. This paper follows Lodge's cue, insofar as it proposes an alternative vocabulary for addressing what formal experimentation means for novelists today as they advance the artistry of inheritance. By ‘alternative’, I mean without resorting to that now familiar terminology which has so belaboured accounts of historiographic metafiction, whereby the specificity of the text is typically sacrificed to that overarching view of fictional narcissism, so influentially rehearsed by Linda Hutcheon in the mid-1980s. By equating self-referential fiction with the self-conscious position of historiography as a discipline, such interpretive models have tended to detract from the aesthetic distinction and affective force with which contemporary novelists shape their prose by appealing to the past. While pursuing the recent example of Sarah Waters's The Night Watch (2006) as a novel indebted to the formal heritage of Elizabeth Bowen, I also make the case for embarking on a more historically nuanced approach to the legacies that contemporary writing has absorbed — not simply as instances of homage or pastiche, but of a new and pioneering vein of conscious artistry. If purism is typically understood as a practice of strict adherence or commitment to past movements, in relation to the self-consciousness of current fictional innovation it points us to a more precise notion of creativity for writers who deal reflexively with their Victorian and modernist precursors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]