Virtual meeting of 2nd December 2022, hosted by the University of Edinburgh

The recording of PhilSoc’s most recent meeting is now available to view on the society’s YouTube channel:

This meeting took the form of an early career researcher panel, chaired by Ricardo Napoleão de Souza (University of Edinburgh), and addressed the following question: ‘Is the study of change in languages with little or no historical record fundamentally different from similar work on languages with a lengthy written tradition?’

To this day, there remains a close association between historical linguistics and Indo-European, in part due to the wealth of written sources which scholars can use in historical research on the family. For some, this goes as far as an assumption—often implicit—that historical work based primarily on spoken data is less reliable, accurate, or viable than that based on written sources. These attitudes persist, despite the venerable and successful tradition of historical work on languages without a written record—some of which in fact predates Sir William Jones’s famous ‘common source’ discourse in 1786, heralded as the beginning of Indo-European studies.

In response to this, three early career researchers shared their experiences of using primary spoken data collected in the field to investigate language change, bringing their research perspectives to bear on methodological, conceptual and experiential issues in historical work with unwritten languages.

Speakers:
Ryan Gehrmann (Payap University): ‘Tonogenesis in Mainland Southeast Asia: Reconciling the historical evidence and the comparative evidence’
Tatiana Reid (University of Edinburgh): ‘Untangling the origins of floating suprasegmental component in Nuer’
Laura Arnold (University of Edinburgh): ‘From areal linguistics to historical sociolinguistics: Identifying contact events in northwest New Guinea’