Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte最新文献

{"title":"Language as a Specimen","authors":"Floris Solleveld","doi":"10.1002/bewi.202200039","DOIUrl":"10.1002/bewi.202200039","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Language was never studied by linguists (or philologists) alone. The greater part of the languages of the world was first known in the West through the reports of missionaries, explorers, and colonial administrators, and what they documented reflected their specific interests. Missionaries wrote catechisms, primers, dictionaries, and Bible translations (especially Lord's Prayers); for explorers and administrators, language was one aspect among many to cover in their accounts of faraway regions. Peoples were identified by their language; toponyms served for geographic description; names of plants and animals were gathered together with specimens and images of plants and animals. In this context, linguistic materials were equally described as “specimens.” This article investigates the various ways in which language material was used and conceived of as a specimen, and the global trajectories of these “specimens.” Especially the role of naturalist explorers deserves closer attention in this regard. What they did, throughout the late 18^th and 19^th century, was gathering language material as one kind of specimen among others, Forster in the Pacific, Humboldt, Martius, and d'Orbigny in South America, and Peters in Mozambique. Two large-scale expeditions from the mid-19^th century stand out as examples: the U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838–1842), whose collections later filled the Smithsonian Institution, and the Austrian-Hungarian Novara expedition (1857–1859).</p>","PeriodicalId":55388,"journal":{"name":"Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/bewi.202200039","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9091355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Language in the Global History of Knowledge**","authors":"Floris Solleveld","doi":"10.1002/bewi.202300001","DOIUrl":"10.1002/bewi.202300001","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout the history of global contacts, language has been both a means of communication and an obstacle to the transmission of knowledge. Viewed from a global perspective, the history of knowledge is filled with dragomans and munshis, Jesuits in Mandarin robes translating astronomical knowledge one way and Confucian texts the other, bilingual and bicultural intermediaries, trade jargons and cosmopolitan interlanguages. At the same time, while goods, specimens, technologies, and even texts travelled across continents, any comparison of knowledge practices and fields of knowledge across cultures is fraught with translation problems. One of the main problems in treating the history of knowledge from a global perspective—or in global history in general —is that no single individual can master enough languages to have a truly global overview. But language has not only been a means and an obstacle—it has also been an object of study is its own right, both within scholarly traditions and as part of interlingual encounters. Arguably, any kind of knowledge also involves its own forms of linguistic knowledge, whether it be the names of plants and animals, technical jargon, or advanced grammatical understanding and philological exegesis. How does this knowledge about language fit in the wider history of knowledge? It is the interrelation and the tension between language as an object of study and language as a carrier of knowledge that this theme issue aims to explore. To speak of a “global history of knowledge” is not unproblematic. It merges two container notions—global history and history of knowledge—that are themselves functionally vague, and suggests an image of a global commonwealth of learning. That image, though idealized, is not necessarily false; like so many other things, knowledge has globalized increasingly over the past centuries. But like so many other things global, it is and has been a global market, a hierarchical constellation, and a battlefield as much as a commonwealth, and the global knowledge society was certainly not established by global consensus. In focusing on the linguistic aspects, this theme issue offers a more concrete perspective on the problems of transmission and global comparison. Covering developments from the 17 to the 20 century, individual papers address such issues as the role of language study within various literary cultures; the role of interpreters, intermediaries, and gate-keepers; and the history of","PeriodicalId":55388,"journal":{"name":"Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9120631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"James Cowles Prichard and the Linguistic Foundations of Ethnology**","authors":"Ian Stewart","doi":"10.1002/bewi.202200036","DOIUrl":"10.1002/bewi.202200036","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines the English scholar James Cowles Prichard's attention to language and comparative philology within his wider project on the natural history of man. It reveals that linguistic evidence was among the most important elements for Prichard in his overarching scientific aim of investigating human physical diversity, and served as the evidential foundation for his ethnology. His work on Celtic comparative philology made him not only one of the earliest British adopters of German comparative grammar, but a comparative philologist of European stature in his own right. More generally, linguistic evidence helped Prichard to keep his magnum opus, <i>Researches into the Physical History of Mankind</i>, as logically ordered as possible, and therefore to turn ethnology into a discipline with analytical aspirations on a global scale.</p>","PeriodicalId":55388,"journal":{"name":"Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/bewi.202200036","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9103163","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Yoshio Gonnosuke and His Comparative Dutch-Japanese Syntax: Glimpses at the Unpublished Second Part of Siebold's “Epitome Linguae Japonicae”**","authors":"Sven Osterkamp","doi":"10.1002/bewi.202200037","DOIUrl":"10.1002/bewi.202200037","url":null,"abstract":"<p>After outlining the life and works of interpreter Yoshio Gonnosuke, this paper introduces the manuscript witnesses of his hitherto unstudied comparative Dutch–Japanese syntax written in the mid-1820s, which was modelled on Pieter Weiland's <i>Nederduitsche spraakkunst</i> (1805). This is followed by a closer look at the process of compilation and publication of Philipp Franz von Siebold's “Epitome linguae japonicae,” of which only the first part was published in 1826. Evidence is provided to confirm Yoshio's involvement in this work and to suggest that Yoshio's syntax was in fact intended to form the core of its unpublished second part.</p>","PeriodicalId":55388,"journal":{"name":"Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/bewi.202200037","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9097634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The “Greenberg Controversy” and the Interdisciplinary Study of Global Linguistic Relationships**","authors":"Judith R. H. Kaplan","doi":"10.1002/bewi.202200038","DOIUrl":"10.1002/bewi.202200038","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper examines the controversy that followed the 1987 publication of Joseph Greenberg's book, <i>Language in the Americas</i>, attending to the role of language and linguistic research within overlapping disciplinary traditions. With this text, Greenberg presented a macro-level tripartite classification that opposed then dominant fine-grained analyses recognizing anywhere from 150 to 200 distinct language families. His proposal was the subject of a landmark conference, examining strengths and weaknesses, the unpublished proceedings of which are presented here for the first time. For specialists in the anthropological and comparative-historical study of Indigenous American languages, Greenberg's intervention highlighted the tension between language, conceived as an abstract object of study, and languages, understood to be carriers of specific cultural knowledge. For physical anthropologists and archaeologists, his theory was initially fortuitous on programmatic, substantive, and methodological grounds. The essay will show how interdisciplinary appeals were figured by supporters as a virtue, and by critics as a vice. The essay further highlights ethical reasons for integrating historical narratives of science and the humanities.</p>","PeriodicalId":55388,"journal":{"name":"Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9464318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Titelbild: (Ber. Wissenschaftsgesch. 4/2022)","authors":"","doi":"10.1002/bewi.202280401","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/bewi.202280401","url":null,"abstract":"<p>\u0000 <figure>\u0000 <div><picture>\u0000 <source></source></picture><p></p>\u0000 </div>\u0000 </figure>\u0000 </p>","PeriodicalId":55388,"journal":{"name":"Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/bewi.202280401","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"137802600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Inhaltsverzeichnis: Ber. Wissenschaftsgesch. 4/2022","authors":"","doi":"10.1002/bewi.202280411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/bewi.202280411","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55388,"journal":{"name":"Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/bewi.202280411","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"137802599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Wilhelm Reich and Sexology from Below","authors":"Cat Moir","doi":"10.1002/bewi.202200007","DOIUrl":"10.1002/bewi.202200007","url":null,"abstract":"<p>One of sexologist Wilhelm Reich's most ambitious and enduring theories claims that sexuality and sexual repression play a central role in the production and reproduction of class structures and hierarchies. From 1927–1933, Reich combined his sexological work with his communist political convictions in a movement that became known as sex-pol. Reich developed some of his most provocative and potentially emancipatory theories through this empirical work with members of working-class communities. Though they often remain anonymous in his writings, the traces of their voices remain audible throughout. In this paper, I employ a Gramscian method, developed by post-colonial scholars, to read for the trace of proletarian voices in Reich's archive. I argue that these subjects helped to theorize the role of sex in producing and reproducing class oppression. Reading for the trace of proletarian voices in the archive expands our understanding of how working-class subjects in early twentieth-century Germany and Austria helped to produce concrete sexological knowledge from below.</p>","PeriodicalId":55388,"journal":{"name":"Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/oa_pdf/9b/9e/BEWI-45-625.PMC10108179.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9675348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Texts, Practice and Practitioners: Computational Cultures at Work in Early Modern South India**","authors":"D. Senthil Babu","doi":"10.1002/bewi.202200012","DOIUrl":"10.1002/bewi.202200012","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay will discuss the hegemonic role that texts have come to play in the historiography of subcontinental mathematical traditions. It will argue that texts need to be studied as records of practices of people's working lives, grounded in social hierarchies. We will take particular mathematical texts to show how different occupational registers have come to shape practices that defy the binaries of concrete and abstract, high and low mathematics or the pure and applied conundrum. Measuring, counting and accounting practices as part of the routine work of practitioners performing their caste occupations then provide us with a spectrum of the computational activities that controlled and regulated the lives of people in the past. In the process the act of computing itself gained certain political values such as cunning and manipulation, identified with professions of village accountant and merchant, for example. Drawn from my earlier work on these records, I discuss the occupational role of the accountant as a political functionary who assessed and authenticated the measurements of land and produce in the village, making values of the labor performed by others, and creating avenues for his own proficiency as a mathematical practitioner.</p>","PeriodicalId":55388,"journal":{"name":"Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10100452/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9351518","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Forschung und Freizeit: Karl von Frischs Aufenthalt in Neapel 1911**","authors":"Christoph Hoffmann","doi":"10.1002/bewi.202200005","DOIUrl":"10.1002/bewi.202200005","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In March 1911, Karl von Frisch visited the Zoological Station in Naples for the first time. During his stay, Frisch, who had just received his doctorate, was studying the color adaptation of marine fish. At the same time, as diary notes show, he also completed an extensive tourist program. Frisch was not alone in this; many scientists combined their time in Naples with excursions and other pleasures. Usually these activities are labelled—in Frisch's words—as „diversion“ and „relaxation“ from the activities in the laboratory. Expanding this point, I will examine the various relationships between labour, recreation, research, and tourism based on Frisch's notes during his stay in Naples. Finally, I will take a look at the financial side of Frisch's stay in Naples.</p>","PeriodicalId":55388,"journal":{"name":"Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10693448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}