The present workshop addresses questions of language contact and language change, as well as language standardization in the Christian context both in Europe and in the New World (Americas, Africa) through a study of diachronic and synchronic corpora. Special attention is paid, on the one hand, to the role of translation as a sight of language contact, and on the other hand, to register variation as an indicator of differential propagation of innovations appeared in Christian context.

Project “Cognitive and linguistic consequences of translation. Comparative approaches”

Workshop 3/3. Christianity, language contact, language change

Description of the project

The project focuses on the cognitive and linguistic consequences of the translation process, especially in the Christian context. It brings together anthropologists and linguists working on conversion, cultural transmission and translation theory, as well as on various case studies, whose geography comprises Oceania, Amazonia, Yucatan, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East, Europe, Alaska and Chukotka (Russia), and whose temporal frame spreads from the Early Medieval times to Spanish colonization of the Americas and to the present time. The first two workshops of the series, “Conversion, translation, interpretation” and “(Dis)continuitie(s), transmutation(s), took place on September 18 and October 16, 2017.

The present workshop addresses questions of language contact and language change, as well as language standardization in the Christian context both in Europe and in the New World (Americas, Africa) through a study of diachronic and synchronic corpora. Special attention is paid, on the one hand, to the role of translation as a sight of language contact, and on the other hand, to register variation as an indicator of differential propagation of innovations appeared in the Christian context.

Programme

• 9:30—10:00 Coffee
• 10:00—11:00 Maria Khachaturyan (University of Helsinki; LLACAN, CNRS) Introduction : How qara’ ‘to read’ in Arabic became kānà ‘Christianity’ in Mano: a story of linguistic and religious contact in Forest Guinea
• 11:00—12:00 Capucine Boidin, Élodie Blestel (Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, INaLCO) State of the art and current research on Guaraní reducido corpora (Paraguay 17-19 C.)
• 12:00—13:30 Lunch break
• 13:30—14:15 Elena Parina (University of Marburg) Latin influence on literary Welsh? Welsh suffix -edic and its place in the development of the Welsh language
• 14:15—15:00 Bridget Drinka (University of Texas at San Antonio) The Sacral Stamp of Greek: Periphrastic Constructions in New Testament Translations of Latin, Gothic, and Old Church Slavonic
• 15:00—15:30 Coffee break
• 15:30—16:00 General discussion

The project is supported by a grant from the Fyssen Foundation and by the research unit LLACAN, CNRS.