From Oral to Bookish: the Scripturalization of Yezidi Oral Tradition and Its Implications II

Dozent/in:

Eszter Spät

Termine:

Mo, 18:00 - 20:00, SP17/01.05

Inhalt:

Until recently, the religious tradition of Yezidis, an ethno-religious minority, was based exclusively on oral tradition. The lack of written scriptures not only determined the nature of Yezidi religion, but also led to the social marginalization of the Yezidis in an environment where historically only “people of the Book” enjoyed legal acknowledgement. The course studies the introduction of school education in the recent decades and the impact of newly acquired general literacy on Yezidi religious institutions and oral tradition: the process of scripturalization, the creation of written body of texts and a “theology”, canonization and uniformization of texts and traditions, and concomitant transformation of traditional social institutions and traditional power hierarchy. We will also look at the various strategies Yezidis have used to “create” books, from “imagined” scriptures to various understandings of heavenly revelation.

Language variation and change in contact settings

Dozent/in:

Laurentia Schreiber

Termine:

Di, 14:15 - 15:45, SP17/01.18

Inhalt:

This course is a study group primarily intended for MA students with the aim to understand the mechanisms of language contact. The course will focus on the structural effects of language contact on language variation and change and is not in first instance a sociolinguistic class, although sociolinguistic aspects like the societal setting in which a language is spoken as well as individual and societal multilingualism play a crucial role in analysing structural variation and change. The central research question of the class asks what happens to languages when they get in contact and which structural effects may result from this. The class is structured in three parts: I. What is language contact? II. What is language change and what is the role of language variation in it? III. Principles of contact-induced language change. The course is designed as a workgroup including both theory and hands-on practice; each session will consist roughly of a theoretical part and a practical part in which case studies will be examined. On the part of students, active participation in class is required, involving preparation of course readings and an oral presentation of an individual case study on language contact in a language of their choice, which will be also the topic of the final term paper.
The course has the following objectives: Upon completion, students (i) are able to reproduce theoretical knowledge on language contact, its structural effects and sociolinguistic conditions (ii) can reconstruct the process of linguistic theory building by means of inductive reasoning (iii) are capable of designing a contact linguistic study

Empfohlene Literatur:

Introductory reading: Thomason, S. G. 2001. Language Contact: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Other course readings: Lucas, Ch. 2015. Contact-induced language change. In Bowern, C. & B. Evans (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics, 519–536. London: Routledge. Matras, Y. 2007. The borrowability of structural categories. In Matras, Y. & J. Sakel (eds.), Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-Linguistic Perspective, 31-73. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Thomason, S. G. & Kaufman, T. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Winford, D. 2003. An Introduction to Contact Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.