How Language Change Actually Took Place

Altering’ in Late Ottoman Legal and Bureaucratic Practice

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2631454
AutoresMarc Aymes (0000-0003-4994-6537, Centre d'études Turques, Ottomanes, Balkaniques et Centrasiatiques, autor correspondente)
Ano2020
Volume31
Fascículo31
Data de publicação2020-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoEuropean journal of Turkish studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1773-0546 • E-ISSN: 1773-0546
EditoraOpenEdition (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.4000/ejts.6914
OpenAlexW3162657966
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas3
Referências citadas33

The study of language change is a necessary correlate of historical semantics, if not a precondition for it. Yet there are many ways of looking for linguistic alterations: they could be operating at the level of ‘discourse,’ i.e. within an arborescence of ideas; or, they could derive from the material layout of linguistic artefacts. This paper leans toward the latter stance: it commits to analysing language change literally, at its most material, as a physical process of alteration. In administrative and judicial sources from the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Ottoman Empire, that process was referred to (among other names) as taḥrîf. Focusing on the materiality of such rewritings, interpolations, and emulations, means combining two kinds of historical semantics: one that rests on discrete and meaningful lexemes, the other on conceptual relationships embedded in phrasings that determine the choice of words. The case for methodological materialism also implies that language change be understood not primarily as a macroscopic, long-running, institutional process, but as a minute, largely ephemeral, practical event. This way of dealing with historical documents as intrinsically precarious readings lays the groundwork for approaching language change from below

Aesthetics · Ephemeral key · Epistemology · Language change · Linguistics · Materialism · Semantic change · Sociology · Byzantine Studies and History · Computer Science · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Islamic Studies and History · Philosophy