Philology and Multilingualism: Rethinking Language, Communities and Change

演講摘要：

The concepts of uniformity (of sound change) and inheritance (of linguistic systems through time) have been at the heart of much philological work over the last two centuries: The guiding idea of language reconstruction is that languages diverge and over time form daughter languages, which can be analysed like a genetic tree. However, recently doubt has been cast over the (universal) applicability of this methodological stance. Much as the concepts help to illuminate some aspects of language history, they risk obscuring other, equally significant, aspects – in particular effects of multilingualism and language contact. In this talk I survey some of this discussion and place it in a wider context of the history of (Western) science. I will explore some consequences of this multilingual critique, if taken seriously, for our understanding of language and language change, speech communities through time, and the wider intellectual enterprise of European enlightenment.

（本演講以英文進行，無須事先報名）