SEELECTS – seizoen 2015-2016

Giorgio Ziffer (Università degli studi di Udine)

The Sermon on Law and Grace is one of the most celebrated literary works of Kievan literature and, more generally, of the Church Slavic literature of Slavia Christiana. Written in the first half of the 11th century, it is traditionally attributed to Metropolitan Hilarion, the first Kievan metropolitan of East Slavic origin.

Almost all scholarship devoted to this work has been limited to the study of only one textual witness, namely, the famous Synodal manuscript n° 591 (preserved in the Moscow Historical Museum), which is considered the sole representant of the first (or complete) redaction. In contrast with the aforementioned critical tendency, it will be argued that the rest of the manuscript tradition, which consists of no fewer than 54 mss., is of paramount importance for the history of the work’s tradition as well as for the puzzles of textual criticism. Two main features of the manuscript tradition will be discussed, i.e. contamination and interpolation; in addition a new stemmatic interpretation for the Synodal manuscript will be proposed.

The second part of this talk will focus on (1) the question of the work’s composition—which in the past several decades has often been defined as a cluster of originally separate and autonomous textual units that were later put together, perhaps by the author himself—and (2) the question of the work’s literary and spiritual meaning.

Leonid Kulikov (Universiteit Gent)

This talk will focus on a half-forgotten episode from the history of Soviet linguistics. In 1950, at the end of the discussion about Marxism in linguistics, Stalin made the puzzling claim that the Russian national language is based on the so-called ‘Kursko-Orlovskij’ dialect. Outlining the historical context of these years (the end of the dominance of Marr’s New Theory of Language, or “Japhetidology”), the lecture will try to uncover possible origins of this statement.

Valentin Inzko & Stef Jansen

On the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the Dayton Peace Agreement, this panel will discuss Bosnia and Herzegovina’s road to recovery after the war 1992-1995. While the agreement had ended the fighting and the bloodshed, many have argued that the country remains frozen in time and deadlocked in a disfunctional state apparatus.

Is today Bosnia and Herzegovina functional multiethnic state? What does the three partite presidency along with the complex election rules that require candidates to define themselves by ethnicity, do to the Bosniak, Croat and Serb nationalism, and to the shared life in the country? What is the responsibility of the international community in the contemporary BiH politics? What it means to be an artist, do research on the streets of Sarajevo, or  live in BiH with high unemployment rate, sharp ethnic and social demarcations, but also expereince or participate in a vibrant student/social movements determined to change the course of the country?

Marjan Markovikj (Skopje University)

Macedonian language occupies the central part of the Balkan Peninsula and, as an official language of the Republic of Macedonia, it is a genetically Slavic language with an inherited structure and lexicon, transferred to an environment with genetically unrelated languages. In the course of history, the borders either expanded or decreased, and the internal and external circumstances changed and influenced the language. The Ottoman period (almost 500 years) is a period of a linguistic convergence, which resulted with the shaping of the so-called Balkan linguistic league. During common contact, and with the goal of achieving clearer communication between the speakers, the languages of the Balkans have changed their structure and have moved (mainly with language means) in a direction where semantics is the main factor of those processes. Language systems adapt and above all, come closer to one another. This means that the elements of that complex adaptive system are deeply integrated into the dialects of Macedonian language. It integrates the inherited Slavic elements and the acquired Balkan elements. The system continues to use and add new cores, creating new ties, resulting in more condense, clearer language expressions with more precise meaning. Further, the lecture will try to reveal the mechanisms of transfer of the common Balkan elements integrated in the dialects of the Macedonian language, i.e. their transfer and adaptation in modern Macedonian language.

Evangelia Adamou (LACITO, CNRS, Paris)

Several studies on language contact report the use of content words and especially nouns in most contact settings (e.g., Thomason & Kaufman, 1988; Muysken, 2000; Myers-Scotton, 2002; Matras & Sakel, 2007; Matras, 2009; Haspelmath & Tadmor, 2009). Also, a vast literature on language contact suggests that the degree of borrowing is related to extra-linguistic factors such as the intensity and type of language contact, as well as on language attitudes (e.g., Thomason & Kaufman, 1988; Muysken, 2000; Winford, 2003; Matras, 2009; Haspelmath & Tadmor, 2009).

In this talk I will present evidence relevant to this discussion from collaborative research conducted within the French-German ANR-DFG project EuroSlav, “Electronic database of endangered Slavic varieties in non-Slavic speaking European countries”, co-directed with Prof. Walter Breu. This study is based on the analysis of free-speech corpora from four Slavic minority languages traditionally spoken in Austria, Germany, Greece, and Italy. The corpora were collected among fluent speakers of the Slavic languages in a language documentation perspective and are freely available online http://lacito.vjf.cnrs.fr/pangloss/.

A quantitative analysis of the corpora, totalling approximately 34,000 word-tokens, was conducted in a variationist perspective with respect to the study of language contact (see Poplack, 1993; Adamou, in press). It appears that the Slavic-speaking communities of Austria, Germany, and Greece use surprisingly low rates of word-tokens from the current-contact language, i.e., German and Greek, despite fluency of the speakers in both languages. These communities can be thought of as ‘low borrowers’ similar to the typology proposed in Tadmor (2009). In contrast, the Molise Slavic speakers from Italy are producing significantly higher rates of word-tokens from Italian, and thus fall under the category of ‘high borrowers’ (Tadmor 2009: 57). A Random Forests analysis (Breiman, 2001) identifies ‘language’ as the main predictor for the ratio of both borrowings and noun borrowings. This result can be interpreted as an indicator of the existence of borrowing patterns in bilingual communities (also see Poplack, 1985; Adamou & Granqvist, 2014; Adamou, in press; Travis & Torres Cacoullos, in press). Finally, comparison of the results with existing sociolinguistic studies on these Slavic minority languages allows us to consider that these patterns of borrowing depend on the intensity and type of contact in the past and, perhaps more importantly, on language attitudes that stem from the existence or not of century-long literary traditions.

Jan Patrick Zeller (Carl von Ossietzky-Universität, Oldenburg)

Isa Blumi, Raymond Detrez, Dimitris Dalakoglou & Artan Sadiku

This panel will discuss the recent financial, political and migrant crises that have been sweeping South East Europe, and the social movements triggered by these crises. Ranging from populist, almost authoritarian, regimes to radical leftist governments and leaders in the region, the panelists will explore the local political dynamics, but also the shared future of Southeast Europe within and beyond the paradigm of crisis. Central question is if the social movements could bring tangible possibility for social change. Is social justice in the region achievable within the neo-liberal context governed by global geo-strategic interests?