While it has been known for a long time that human languages can change in various ways, it was only in the early 19th century that scholars realized that certain aspects of language change proceed in a surprisingly regular manner, allowing us to reconstruct historical stages of languages which have never been documented in written sources. The…[Read more]

The weblog Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice, published on the Hypotheses platform for scientific blogging, offers tutorials and discussion notes on computer-assisted approaches to the history and diversity of languages. A substantial part of its content is contributed as part of the ERC Starting Grant “Computer-Assisted Language C…[Read more]

Two well preserved Punic texts from Carthage are translated and fully justified according to the scholar’s standard showing that Phoenician letter style texts are actually in the Akkadian empire language just like all other pre-Hellenistic Mediterranean texts. The black temple plaque has a poignant yet sophisticated argument blaming first one d…[Read more]

These seven alphabetic gravestone texts and one-coin texts from Sidon date to the Hellenistic era based upon their religious themes and their Greek Island letter styles. In contrast, one earlier coin style from Sidon from the Persian period has the Phoenician letter style. Their underlying language is Akkadian which was the empire language of…[Read more]

This paper provides evidence that Alphabetic Akkadian was being used in the Greek sphere of influence as an ancient authority temple language (like Latin in near modern Europe) prior to the mid-400’s BCE when the nationalistic fervor surrounding their war with the Persian empire replace it with Greek. Its Greek use is also evidenced by the 499 B…[Read more]

What happens when an exercise succeeds too well? Could a school exercise designed to teach
a foreign language also influence how a discipline interprets its central literary texts?
For centuries in Britain, Latin versification was the pinnacle of both pedagogy and scholarship,
the ultimate proof of a good teacher and a good pupil. Every day,…[Read more]

Giuseppe PEZZINI, Terence and the Verb “To Be” in Latin, «Oxford Classi-cal Monographs», Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, XVI + 355 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-873624-0, 75 £.

Questo volume è il frutto della concreta collaborazione tra la SIAC e il Centro di Studi sulla Fortuna dell’Antico “Emanuele Narducci” di Sestri Levante. Le due istituzioni, insieme con il Liceo “Marconi-Delpino” di Chiavari e “Mediaterraneo S.R.L.” di Sestri Levante, hanno, infatti, proficuamente cooperato per la promozione delle XIV Giornate d…[Read more]

F. Prost, Quintus Cicéron, Petit Manuel de la campagne électorale – Marcus Cicéron, lettres à son frère Quintus 1, 1 et 2

J. Wildberger, The Stoics and the State. Theory – Practice – Context

The panel discussion was moderated by Prof. Jan Miernowski (Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw/Department of French & Italian, University of Wisconsin-Madison).

Review of . STRAUMANN, Crisis and Constitutionalism. Roman Political Thought from the Fall of the Republic to the Age of Revolution – M.C. ALEXANDER, Roman Amoralism Reconsidered. The Political Culture of the Roman Republic and Historians in an Era of Disillusionment

This study investigates the relatedness and history of the Austronesian languages of Borneo, which is the third largest island in the world and home to significant linguistic diversity. We apply Bayesian phylogenetic dating methods to lexical cognate data based on four historical calibration points to infer a dated phylogeny of 87 languages. The…[Read more]

Ontologies for DigitalHumanities – O4DH workshop: Demystifying ontologies, April 20th and 21st, 2021, 5pm to 7pm (Paris time).

‘Demystifying’ is a new series of workshops of the Ontologies for Digital Humanities (O4Dh) initiative supported by the Université Savoie Mont Blanc and Liaocheng University. The 2021 workshops are dedicated to…[Read more]

Entry ‘Aristophanes: Clouds’, in: The Literary Encyclopedia (published version)

Entry ‘Sophocles: Philoctetes’, in: The Literary Encyclopedia (published version)

Entry ‘Ancient Greek Theatre in Italy’ in The Literary Encyclopedia (published version)

This article proposes a new understanding of the etymology of histrio. It is likely that it originally came from Greek histor, as has been demonstrated by Szemerényi 1975. However, the conclusions presented by this scholar must be slightly revised, in particular the distinction he establishes between histrio and ludius. While the second word has…[Read more]

Johann Joachim Winckelmann not only idealized Greek Classical art, but also the whole ancient Classical Greek world in a way that went well beyond what could be envisaged as historical knowledge. His influence on the history of contemporary literature and on classical scholarship, however, is not an obvious topic to scrutinize, since he was almost…[Read more]

While analysing lexical data of Western Kho-Bwa languages of the Sino-Tibetan or Trans-
Himalayan family with the help of a computer-assisted approach for historical language
comparison, we observed gaps in the data where one or more varieties lacked forms for certain
concepts. We employed a new workflow, combining manual and automated steps,…[Read more]