On the LINGUIST List, Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy reviews Tore Janson’s book A Natural History of Latin. The book is now on my reading list. I have a long-standing #[1] fascination with ancient and medieval thought on language, so this book seems like a good read.
[1]: It probably began when as an undergraduate sophomore at the University of Münster I gate-crashed a graduate seminar on medieval semantics. Professor Schepers taught this course to six or so indisputably nerdy students in an impressively scholarly office in the Leibniz Research Institute. What we did was a line by line reading of William of Sherwood’s Syncategoremata in Latin, translating and commenting as we went along. Other texts we consulted were some basic ancient writings on grammar (Donatus comes to mind) and passages by Ockham on supposition theory. Great fun. William of Sherwood’s tractatus was where I first encountered the puzzle of the semantics of exceptives (”every man except Socrates”), which a decade later was the topic of my first original research paper in semantics.
Home > About This Post
This entry was posted by fintel on Friday, April 1st, 2005, at 8:18 am.
Subscribe to the
RSS 2.0 feed for all comments to this post.
Post a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.