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Copyright of International Journal for Arabic Linguistics & Literature Studies (JALLS) is the property of Refaad for Studies, Research & Development and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Video game multimodality has been discussed mainly from the standpoints of Game and Media Studies, but also increasingly by Translation Studies (Mejías-Climent 2017; O'Hagan 2007; Vázquez-Calvo et al. 2019). However, there is still little research focusing on how mobile game localizers construe poly-semiotic texts and their subcomponents during the translation process. Due to certain factors, the textual components of video games are commonly separated from its audiovisual elements before being sent to localization experts, who are then confronted with disassembled "texts" forced back to monomodality. Furthermore, the "text" is intertwined with programming languages and subdivided into disconnected snippets. Thus, video game localizers constantly perform what is often called "blind" translation (Dietz 2006, 2007; O'Hagan and Mangiron 2013; Mejías-Climent 2021). The present piece of research focuses on the notion of the multimodal "text" as a "web of texts" (Gambier 2021) in the field of mobile game localization from Chinese into European languages and other Eastern languages. It analyses how professional localizers perform their meaning-making processes in regard to "text" and "context" in such a medium and explores how they strive to reinstate multimodality through (re)contextualization. The study replicated "blind" localization processes via a video game translation test finished and commented on by respondents under context-scarce conditions. Data was then triangulated with online surveys and interviews to assess localizers' considerations towards the "text" as a "web of texts." Through quantitative and qualitative coding, the paper explores the different elements present in the web(s) and offers a view of the mobile game as a vast entity seen by the translator from an incredibly limited and limiting element, that of the monomodal "text." Results show that mobile game localizers construct, re-construct, and co-construct the "text" according to previous gaming and translation experiences, or even imagined representations of how, why, and where "texts" are embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous work using lexical data from around the world has suggested that distances between language varieties are distributed such that varieties are typically either rather similar, qualifying as dialects of the same language, or rather dissimilar, qualifying as different languages, with a scarcity of varieties that are around halfway similar. Using a potentially biased sample, Wichmann (2019) observed that there is a bimodal distribution of distances with two roughly normal distributions separated by a valley. Here we test whether a similar distribution is found when using another source of data and an unbiased sample drawn from the cells of a geographical grid (of central Europe). The data consists of 18 lexemes from 274 doculects. Using Bayesian beta regression and leave-one-out cross-validation, we show that the data follows a bimodal distribution which is robust to sampling, and also to at least some aspects of the data (coarse- vs. fine-grained phonetic transcriptions). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language has proven to be an important factor in film performance models, film finance considerations, and festival program selections. This essay uses multi-year global data sets (UN and supplementary databases) to analyse the relationship between the languages in which a film is produced and offered to cinemagoers on the one hand, and the co-production activities and dynamics which engender these patterns on the other hand. While European Commission policies, underlining the peculiar “linguistic polity”of the European Union, have been influential in the making of multilingual cinema productions motivated by subsidy rules, taxation and grant schemes, the pattern is rather global, reflecting uptake of cinematic product in many “territories” and the mobilization of film across national and regional language divides. The analysis shows that Europeanization has much wider implications beyond Europeans’ cultural consumption and identity construction, with Europe’s co-production policies casting a wider net of cultural resistance to Global Hollywood and its majority of English-language blockbusters as well as attending to language preservation in the European neighborhood in addition to Europe, where local and regional heritage policies are well instituted. The study examines the results against Abram de Swaan’s theory of the Global Language System, examining the Q-value theory to the language patterns emerging from film productions with multiple languages, which must be assessed in its relation to cultural consumption that may not follow from formal schooling and habitus formation.

The article analyses the origin of international terms used in Azerbaijani. As in other world languages, international terms play a unique role in the terminological layer of Azerbaijani. International terms have appeared throughout history in the terminological system of many languages, including the Azerbaijani vocabulary. The legal process of moving terminological units from one language system to another continues. Research conducted on the terminological lexicon of the Azerbaijani language shows that international terms of various origins differ quantitatively. The vocabulary of the Azerbaijani included terms from Arabic (Arabic origin) and European languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and others). Until the years of independence, the intermediary role in the transfer of terms belonged to the Russian language. Among the terms that have passed into our language in modern times, borrowings from European languages predominate. In the article, hybrid terms created based on lexical units of different languages were simultaneously analyzed using examples. Here are statistical indicators of the origin of international terms in the Azerbaijani.

Despite the wealth of studies on word order, there have been very few studies on the order of minor word categories such as determiners and quantifiers. This is likely due to the difficulty of formulating valid cross-linguistic definitions for these categories, which also appear problematic from a computational perspective. A solution lies in the formulation of comparative concepts and in their computational implementation by combining different layers of annotation with manually compiled list of lexemes; the proposed methodology is exemplified by a study on the position of these categories with respect to the nominal head, which is conducted on a parallel corpus of 17 European languages and uses Shannon’s entropy to quantify word order variation. Whereas the entropy for the article-noun pattern is, as expected, extremely low, the proposed methodology sheds light on the variation of the demonstrative-noun and the quantifier-noun patterns in three languages of the sample.

This study examines the use of laʿalla in the Qur'an, arguing that its most common meaning is 'so that' rather than 'perhaps', the common dictionary meaning. A few Western scholars have realised this, mainly on the basis of their independent inspection of the Qur'anic text, despite the fact that this meaning did not appear in any of the available dictionaries, grammars, and reference works in European languages until recent years. This interpretation of laʿalla is supported not only by the general sense indicated by contextual reading, but also by syntactic analysis of passages in which laʿalla appears. The present study corroborates and refines earlier analyses and shows that the interpretation of laʿalla as 'so that' is supported by several Arabic grammatical and lexical works. Furthermore, it finds that in the Qur'anic context, laʿalla is strongly connected with rhyme; it generally serves to introduce verse-final clausulae that rhyme, most often, but not always, in -ūn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an editorial focuses on various aspects of European language policy, including the promotion of multilingualism, the use of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) in assessment, and the role of English. It examines specific cases such as family language policies in Galicia and language exams as a tool for managing linguistic integration in the Czech context, highlighting challenges and proposing potential policy implications.

The medieval tendency to view Islam as a Christian heresy continues to influence Qurʾanic studies in the Western academy due to the academy's origins as a religious institution and the absence of systematic reckoning by contemporary scholars. Ludovico Marracci's 1698 Qurʾan commentary was both the culmination of the medieval polemic tradition and the blueprint for subsequent Western engagement with the Qurʾan. Though few Qurʾanic scholars have the proficiency in Latin necessary to read Marracci's work, Western Qurʾanic studies continues to overemphasize biblical "sources" for the Qurʾan because the field originated in a methodology that was fundamentally polemical rather than exegetical. This essay proposes models from within the Christian and Muslim traditions that can pave the way toward a break from Biblicist tropes toward an interfaith understanding based on the rich tradition of Muslim exegesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Columbiads, epic poems written in a range of European languages (French, English, German) between 1753 and 1798 and dealing with the encounter between Columbus and native American peoples, address in a variety of ways the linguistic barriers it threw up. Often, interest in the languages of the indigenous peoples goes hand in hand with respect for their cultures. Whereas some authors minimize the language gap in order to promote an imperialist or missionary agenda, in others it is foregrounded as a manifestation of cultural alterity. The figure of a translator is introduced to personify the desire to venture into a linguistically and culturally different world, and its danger. One example, the Columbona of the Swiss-German author Johann Jacob Bodmer, 1753, goes so far as to depict European sailors and native Americans engaging together in the adventure of language learning in order to share each other's knowledge and view of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that the West could glimpse its own unthought-of by 'de-ontologicalizing' its thought, and that a fruitful way to do this is to draw on Chinese thought. In particular, the author develops herein the notion of between (l'entre), which is less a locus than a dynamic passage between states or extrema. This contrasts with the (static) Western notion of Being, where a thing either is or is not. Unlike a thing, between has no being, no nature, no properties. For the Greeks life was, similarly, an alternation of emptiness (desire or want) and fullness (satiety). Instead, life is in flux between those extrema. Accordingly, between is not an (ontological) intermediary but processual, like the through of the Tao. The author explores between in the Chinese conception of landscape as mountain(s)-water(s) and applies between to urban renewal, underscoring its value as a tool for the de-ontologizing of Western thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grounded in the use of the visual, Chinese thought and language operate within a wide spectrum that includes calligraphy, poetry, literature, painting, and garden-landscapes. In languages of phonetic signifiers, the spectrum is deliberately controlled to be narrower, excluding the visual from language and delegating it to iconology. These linguistic-cultural strategies have an ancient past and produce far-reaching consequences in thought and artefacts, with garden-landscapes being one of the most substantial outcomes. Garden-landscapes are China's equivalent to Greek architecture, leading us to both a repositioning of Chinese thought and a new framework of architecture. In this sense, the city, serving the function of thought in the expanded medium of conceptual and material units of meanings (figures), incorporates things into intellectual orders. This is perhaps the most important feature of Chinese thought and one that is the first to be obscured when it is rendered in scholarship in Indo-European languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humor and sarcasm are closely related – sarcasm is often identified with aggressive humor or humorous mockery. Research in this area is common in Western European languages, but not in non-WEIRD populations. The aim of the study was to examine the relationship between humor styles and sarcasm use in the Turkish-speaking population. We also attempted to predict the use of different sarcasm types (general sarcasm, embarrassment diffusion, face-saving, and frustration diffusion) by the scores of the Humor Styles Questionnaire (Martin, Rod A., Patricia Puhlik-Doris, Gwen Larsen, Jeanette Gray & Kelly Weir. 2003. Individual differences in uses of humor and their relation to psychological well-being: Development of the Humor Styles Questionnaire. Journal of Research in Personality 37(1). 48–75) scales (aggressive, affiliative, self-enhancing, and self-defeating humor). The data from 329 Turkish-speaking participants were collected: 250 women and 79 men (Mage = 37; SD = 12.32; age range: 18–70). Participants filled out online questionnaires including Sarcasm Self-Report Scale (Ivanko, Stacey L., Penny M. Pexman & Kara M. Olineck. 2004. How sarcastic are you? Individual differences and verbal irony. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 23(3). 244–271) adapted into Turkish, and the Humor Styles Questionnaire (Martin, Rod A., Patricia Puhlik-Doris, Gwen Larsen, Jeanette Gray & Kelly Weir. 2003. Individual differences in uses of humor and their relation to psychological well-being: Development of the Humor Styles Questionnaire. Journal of Research in Personality 37(1). 48–75) in Turkish adaptation (Tümkaya, Songül. 2011. Humor styles and socio-demographic variables as predictor of subjective well-being of Turkish university students. Egitim ve Bilim 36(160). 158–170). The results showed positive correlations between all humor styles and all sarcasm types, with the strongest correlation with aggressive humor. Regression analysis was used to find predictors of sarcasm use. Our results show that aggressive humor style is the main predictor of all self-reported sarcasm use scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The choice of language for literary creation is not a simple one, especially for African writers. Having grown up in a naturally multilingual environment and exposed to European languages, they often express themselves in the language of former colonizers. However, this is neither obvious nor should it remain a definitive choice for authors from various African countries. We will present different motivations, attitudes, and decisions of several writers; from the most radical, rejecting the European language, to others who hold onto it – either exclusively or accompanied by African languages.

Arabic is a language with rich morphology and few resources. Arabic is therefore recognized as one of the most challenging languages for machine translation. The study of translation into Arabic has received significantly less attention than that of European languages. Consequently, further research into Arabic machine translation quality needs more investigation. This paper proposes a translation model between Arabic and English based on Neural Machine Translation (NMT). The proposed model employs a transformer with multi-head attention. It combines a feed-forward network with a multi-head attention mechanism. The NMT proposed model has demonstrated its effectiveness in improving translation by achieving an impressive accuracy of 97.68%, a loss of 0.0778, and a near-perfect Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) score of 99.95. Future work will focus on exploring more effective ways of addressing the evaluation and quality estimation of NMT for low-data resource languages, which are often challenging as a result of the scarcity of reference translations and human annotators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on new manual of Latin paleography and most important number of manuals or introductions written in Western European languages. It mentions graphic publication activity in the field of overview works actually something to have decreased, which in striking contrast to the parallel sharply increased a number of digitized sources from archives and libraries. It also mentions "Handbook of Latin Palaeography" remedy should be created.

It is common knowledge that all living languages change over time, which occurs at three levels; vocabulary, grammar and phonemic system. One of the factors that makes languages change is the contact of languages with each another. However, it does not mean that the Kurdish language did not borrow vocabulary from other languages, especially European ones, as there are many European words related to natural sciences and technology that entered the Kurdish language (Bucak, M, 1988:104), and over time became a part of the Kurdish language that one could not distinguish between them and the original Kurdish vocabularies. These words have gone through a process of assimilation that of adopting the grammatical and phonological features of the Kurdish language. However Arabic has been always more influential on Kurdish in comparison to other languages due to the factor of Islam religion and its holy book of Quran which is written in Arabic and the affiliation of the majority of Kurds to it. The researchers have conducted this study to find out whether the factor of "language ideology" as identified by Michael Silverstein (1979:193); Woolard, K.(1998:4) affects Kurdish intellectuals and makes them borrow lexicon from English and European languages into Kurdish. To reach convenient results, the researchers have conducted a qualitative empirical study and the data have been collected by interviewing 15 intellectuals from different academic disciplines from the inhabitant of Duhok city. The collected data have been submitted for deep content analysis. The outcomes of the study have shown that language ideologies play a considerable role in borrowing words from European languages, especially the English language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowing a foreign language has become one of the most necessary tools in politics, economy, social life and the use of technology. Around 90% of secondary school students learn English first, whether it is compulsory or not. In 2018, the Council of Higher Education (YÖK) reconsidered the curricula of the faculties of education. With this innovation, the necessity of "language teaching to keep up with the world" was emphasized. The lack of a planning process that meets the European criteria and meets the desired requirements in the planning of foreign language education makes an effective language learning process impossible. The European Language Portfolio (ELP) was developed by the Council of Europe in Strasbourg from 1998 to 2000. The European Language Portfolio (ELP) is an assessment used in foreign language teaching across Europe to support and record language learning. The document contains a guideline by which students can define their language proficiency. The method of this study, which was carried out with the data collection method with the qualitative research design, is phenomenology. The questions to be asked to the participants by the second researcher of the study were prepared by taking expert opinion and the final version was created by making a preliminary application. In this study, it was aimed to examine the compatibility between the "English Curriculum" and the "European Language Portfolio" implemented in schools. It is aimed to make an evaluation within the scope of foreign language policies regarding the use of foreign languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses the employment of body part nouns in the creation of phraseological expressions of some European languages, a topic at the crossroads of language, cognition and culture. In particular, the contrastive analysis explores the common linguistic representation of meanings through body part metaphorical expressions in Italian, French, Spanish and English. While several efforts to gauge the existence of a "European linguistic type" (cf. Haspelmath, 2001) have been largely devoted to the study of grammatical structures, a systematic account of the lexical component of the major European languages has not been attempted yet. Among the lexical units, phraseological expressions (e.g. compounds, multiword units, idiomatic expressions, as well as light verb and light noun constructions) represent a relevant ground to inquire into, since they are the most transparent and authentic vehicle of common ideas and experiences gradually rooted in European communicative realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comprehensive theory of child language acquisition requires an evidential base that is representative of the typological diversity present in the world's 7000 or so languages. However, languages are dying at an alarming rate, and the next 50 years represents the last chance we have to document acquisition in many of them. Here, we take stock of the last 45 years of research published in the four main child language acquisition journals: Journal of Child Language, First Language, Language Acquisition and Language Learning and Development. We coded each article for several variables, including (1) participant group (mono vs multilingual), (2) language(s), (3) topic(s) and (4) country of author affiliation, from each journal's inception until the end of 2020. We found that we have at least one article published on around 103 languages, representing approximately 1.5% of the world's languages. The distribution of articles was highly skewed towards English and other well-studied Indo-European languages, with the majority of non-Indo-European languages having just one paper. A majority of the papers focused on studies of monolingual children, although papers did not always explicitly report participant group status. The distribution of topics across language categories was more even. The number of articles published on non-Indo-European languages from countries outside of North America and Europe is increasing; however, this increase is driven by research conducted in relatively wealthy countries. Overall, the vast majority of the research was produced in the Global North. We conclude that, despite a proud history of crosslinguistic research, the goals of the discipline need to be recalibrated before we can lay claim to truly a representative account of child language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a corpus of private correspondence written by 16 authors from the Golden Age period, this study analyses the idiolectal distributions of three distinctive variants of early classical Spanish. After comparing these distributions at different times in the lives of these individuals against those found in the same period in previous variationist studies, the existence of three idiolectal profiles is detected: refractory, in-between and followers. The first two profiles are in the majority, although some examples of the third are also found. In any event, these profiles are not monolithic. On the contrary, with a few exceptions, speakers do not follow the same patterns in the three cases of variation studied. Moreover, a longitudinal analysis of the letters at different life stages shows that the stability of the distributions is the norm. Nevertheless, there are also some exceptions, i.e. authors who evolve significantly in the distribution of the variants, although almost always in the same direction: the progressive replacement of vernacular forms by others, following the prevailing trends of change. The main theoretical implications of these results are connected to previous findings in the literature on earlier stages of other European languages dealing with the role of idiolectal variation in shaping linguistic variation and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hungarian displays a characteristic syntax, that within the generative approach was called non-configurational. For this reason its description is at least unusual, and it cannot be taught with the same formal concepts used for most of the other European languages. Functional approaches, with Functional Discourse Grammar among them, seem to be especially useful in both describing and teaching Hungarian, because they allow the interplay between pragmatics, syntax and semantics. This article sets the most important traditional assumptions about Hungarian syntax within the functional approach, concentrating on issues with word order. It is suggested that the so-called post-verbal field is very important. The central claim is that in a Hungarian sentence not only is the context of the expression recognized, given by the Topic and a possible Focus of communication, but also a distinct target of our discourse: a constituent signalling what we are speaking of that facilitates the making of the sentence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Miedzy Oryginalem a Przekladem is the property of Ksiegarnia Akademicka Sp. zo.o and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper reports on a literary corpus study of four grammatical tenses across four European languages. The corpus consists of a selection of eight chapters from Javier Marías's Spanish novel Así empieza lo malo 'Thus bad begins', and its translations to English, Dutch, and French. We annotated 1579 verb forms in the Spanish source text for tense, and, subsequently, their translations in the other languages, distinguishing between two registers within the novel, i.e., dialogue and narration. We found that the vast majority of the Spanish tenses are translated one-to-one to their counterparts in the three languages, especially in narration. In dialogue, we found several deviations, which we could partially account for within an Optimality Theoretic approach by appealing to the notion of markedness along two different typological dimensions, namely, tense (present versus past) and aspect (imperfective versus perfective). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Vilnius University Open Series is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The global pandemic and subsequent quarantine measures and restrictions have posed an array of challenges to the structure and procedure of education workflow. Foreign Languages Acquisition and Linguistic Education assessment are fundamentally interdisciplinary processes, informed by the nature of linguistic content and types of communicative and professional activities. Cross-sectorial factors of societal change, that provide the backdrop for an interdisciplinary skillset critical transformation, crucial for the COVID-19 emergency educational framework, are considered. The study is based on identification of various interdisciplinary competency principles, derivative of 21st century skills for university staff members and projected digital literacy requirements. It is determined how in the situation of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown all elements of the Final Qualification Assessment at Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University, Ukraine, for European and Oriental Languages programs have been relegated to the digital, remote or hybrid format with the use of ICT tools and skills that comprise an interdisciplinary realm of Foreign Languages acquisition and assessment. Every step of the procedure adaptation to digital format required accelerated development of interdisciplinary skills of all participants and officials and cross-sectorial activities, otherwise not carried out through assessment of Foreign Languages programs.

The article focuses on etymology of the word "bargain" and its background in early medieval northwest European trade. Topics discussed include phonological development of element of verbal communication, loss or compression of the verbal enclitic flexion and trade marked by Gallo-Romance and Germanic bilingualism.

Critical terms in Chinese poetics pose difficulties to those who expect clear definitions and scopes of reference since many such words are not "properly" defined in their first appearances. To make matters worse, they gain new meanings when they are used and reused in different contexts. By tracing the origins and the further resonances of feng in Chinese poetics, this essay demonstrates the discrepancy between the varied meanings of the word in Chinese and those in the English translations. This essay argues that one should not use their preconceptions to judge other literatures and cultures but to respect this "otherness" by probing the other intellectual traditions to find out their particularities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

World literature studies has to navigate between idealism and realism: the idealism of creating a broader and more inclusive understanding of the world's literature, and the realism of how literature circulates and has to overcome many thresholds to change canonization. The increased recognition of how translation is a necessary part of world literature has done much to lay the grounds for an increased engagement with literature in non-European languages. I propose that an understanding of key patterns in the international circulation of literary works can provide a better critique of the imbalances of canonization, and the inspiration for the inclusion of neglected works in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 17th century, works translated into European languages about China such as the Jesuit reports have given rise to a misleading impression that China has only Confucian tradition. To some extent, Confucianism defines the cultural identity of traditional China, but it does not mean that Confucianism steered traditional Chinese culture into monoculturalism. The tradition of unity in diversity is the fundamental reason why Chinese culture has withstood the test of time. Cultural pluralism not only existed in the history, but it still has a subtle impact on Chinese society and Chinese people today. From the Eastern Han Dynasty (25–220) to the modern age, Chinese culture has integrated elements of Buddhism, Christianity as well as Western science and social knowledge, which provided it with a potential of transformation and recreation. The author holds that it is this potential that empowers Chinese culture to meet the new challenges of Western modernity without cutting off its connection with the tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a range of American, Australian, British and Scandinavian research into laughter, the current paper will use the form of pragmatic analysis typically found in qualitative research and apply it to data produced by the quantitative methodology common in the author's own discipline of psychology. Laughter will be examined as an indexical that serves both a discourse deictic function, designating the utterance in which it occurs as non-serious, and a social deictic function, marking the laughing person's preference for social proximity with fellow interlocutors. The paper will then analyse examples and data pertaining to three types of laughter bout derived from taking laughter as an indexical. First, solitary listener laughter will be argued to signify a deferential acknowledgement of continued solidarity with the speaker. Second, solitary speaker laughter will be suggested to mark a simple preference for solidarity. Third, joint laughter will be accepted as a signifier of actual solidarity that may also be used to mark status depending on which party typically initiates the joint laughter. Joint laughter thus acts in a manner closely analogous to the exchange of another set of indexicals, the T and V versions of second person pronouns in European languages. Finally, the paper will conclude by examining the problematic case of laughing at another interlocutor, before briefly considering the implications of this pragmatic perspective for traditional accounts of laughter as well as for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conversation focuses on issues of language and gender and on the debates they have generated in Italy over the past forty years: from linguistic sexism to the role and visibility of women, and then to the representation of non-binary identities. After introducing the differences in expressing gender in Italian and in other European languages, it discusses the proposals made regarding these matters since the 1980s, the reactions to them, and their long-term legacy, mainly in relation to the use of female agentives. The interactions between experts and 'näive linguists' are presented as a case study of the popularisation of the debate, and the key role of the digital sphere is also highlighted. Finally, recent suggestions to move beyond the overextended masculine to address mixed-gender groups and non-binary people are analysed (from the asterisk to the schwa), in parallel with similar attempts made in other languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: While in European grammatical traditions appositions were recognized as a grammatical – rather than a rhetorical – category only around the 16th century, in the Arabic tradition their grammatical status was recognized from the very beginning, that is, from around the 8th century. The early Arabic grammatical tradition even treated – implicitly but clearly enough – the opposition between close and loose apposition, which was not recognized in the European tradition until much later. An additional unique feature of the Arabic tradition, as far as the recognition of apposition in grammatical analysis is concerned, is taken up in this article: the Arabic tradition, or so it seems, was the first to deal with the problem of errors understood as mistakes due to a lack of attention or a lapse of memory on the speaker's part, i.e. what the 19-20th centuries have identified as lapses at large (lapsus linguae or memoriae). These errors were incorporated into the framework of the grammar, since corrections of such errors were considered as a type of apposition or permutation. Such an incorporation is absent from grammars of Indo-European languages, and little present in contemporay general linguistics. This article thus highlights the contribution that Arabic grammar can make to the question of the grammatization of appositions in general linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The language spoken by a community of people is a complex system of linguistic signs formed during the historic coexistence. The emergence of a language is a large process and it can't be determined exactly the beginning, even if the specialists establish always a starting moment. The Romanian language passed during the history through several stages of evolution and maturity. In the last Century, the Romanian language entered in its Modern Age, characterized by stability. However, there are important changes, influenced by the French and Italian languages at the begging of the XX Century and English language at the end of the XX Century. The aim of our paper is to describe and analyse the different stages of the Romanian language in the last 100 years and how it was influenced by the major events that Romania went through. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Acta Linguistica Lithuanica is the property of Institute of the Lithuanian Language and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Corpus Criticorum (1450–1650) (CC) is a pioneering comprehensive bibliography of early modern publications that feature the notion of critique on their title pages. It was constituted by collecting, validating, and curating information from pan-European, language-based, and national union catalogues. A complementary and interconnected “data package” was deposited on Zenodo, comprising: (1) a classical text-based bibliography, supplemented by (2) a CSV dataset of information contained therein, (3) the images of title pages not readily available online, and (4) a comprehensive BibTeX dataset. The CC can be reused in further internal research on the history of critique and as a model for research on the history of other concepts and ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The way of considering the masculine and the feminine in the language is closely related to linguistic conventions. The well-normed uses in the different languages have, beyond the purely grammatical aspect, a cognitive influence which contributes to apprehending the feminine and the masculine in a gendered way or not. We propose for this study to rely on different linguistic uses of genders in some European languages belonging to different linguistic groups. These linguistic differences today give rise to debates on the social and cultural level. We will seek here to show that the cultural aspect and the linguistic aspect are not independent of each other, on the contrary, they are strongly linked and interact in the social representation and the masculine/feminine imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the perception of the nahḍah's literati in Egypt and the Arab mashriq as being narrowly monolingual, due to their literary use of fuṣḥā Arabic and the various ʿāmmiyyahs, this article highlights literary translingual practices in the nahḍah's contact zones in Egypt, Syro-Lebanon, and Iraq. Literary translingualisms took various forms such as bi-or-translingual azjāl ("vernacular verse") and mulammaʿāt (macaronic verse), as well as self-translations. This article focuses on literary translingual practice manifest in the zajal of Muḥammad ʿUthmān Jalāl, Badīʿ Khayrī, Bayram al-Tūnisī, and ʿAlī Diyāb, as well as the mulammaʿāt of ʿAbbūd al-Karkhī. The intricate relations of power among the languages of the nahḍah (i.e. Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and fuṣḥā Arabic in addition to a host of European languages, especially French and English) are also featured in the literary works of authors such as ʿĀʾishah Ismāʿīl Taymūr and Hijri Dede. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates linguistic and cultural attitudes found in tourist phrasebooks written by US travel writer and television host Rick Steves. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Steves's European phrasebook series, it is argued that Steves portrays English speaking tourists as the dominant party in tourist-local interactions and reassures his readers that their lack of foreign language ability will not be an impediment to their travels abroad. Through the use of stereotypical descriptive adjectives and the-plurals (e.g. The French), Steves positions European languages and their speakers as monolithic, homogeneous entities. Furthermore, Steves portrays multilingualism as an expected convenience to travelers rather than as an intellectual accomplishment. This research extends on previous studies which have explored the role tourist phrasebooks play as cultural mediators [Hallett, R. W. (2017). A taste of this lively language: attitudes towards languages other than English in Lonely Planet phrasebooks. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 12(3), 214–230; Koch, E. (2015). Mediation as Worldmaking in Tourist Phrasebooks. Journal of Language, Literature, and Culture, 62(2), 63–76]. The findings in this research will help future phrasebook authors avoid certain types of misleading or even offensive language which may deter travelers who are interested in more authentic travel experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The PapyGreek Treebanks dataset contains documentary texts written in Postclassical Greek (ca. 300 BCE–700 CE), morphosyntactically annotated according to Dependency Grammar. The source of the texts is the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri (DDbDP), which preserves the modern editorial treatment of the documents in TEI Epidoc XML encoding. Aiming to expose linguistic variation in the DDbDP, we have annotated two versions of a selection of documents: the plain transcription and an editorially corrected version. The dataset also comprises metadata about the documents’ dating and provenance, text type, and the persons involved. Furthermore, it facilitates linguistic research on these texts.

The first documents describing Peru and its wealth were translated into Italian immediately after their arrival in Spain. Some of them were lost, therefore, only the Italian translations that reproduce them survived. Translations into other European languages were produced from the Italian versions, which also spread rapidly. These sources played an important role in the construction of the image of Peru in the 16th century. Here I propose a brief analysis of these sources and their circulation in the light of the most recent studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]