Projects matching your search criteria
Introducing Principles and Practices of Phonetics Through Enquiry-Based Learning
Phonetics is the study and description of human speech sounds, their articulatory and acoustic properties, and how the speech signal is conveyed from the speaker to hearer. This project aims to introduce first-year undergraduate students to the practice of phonetic transciption, description and data analysis, and to the concepts of 'linguistic fieldwork' using self-collected and analysed data. The data will come from the participation of Language Informants, whose representative phonetic properties will enrich the students' ear training and analytical skills. We aim to create a digital corpus of audio-visual data to be used across a range of taught modules at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Project Team: Dr Kristine Hildebrandt, Martin Barry Faculty: Humanities
Funding year: 2007a
Keywords: language, linguistics, phonetics, transcription, english
Aspects of Vedic and Greek Poetics
In this project I will study the synchronic poetics of the Rg-Veda, the oldest collection of hymns in Sanskrit, and offer notes towards its relationship to poetics in other Indo-European languages, with special reference to Ancient Greek and Latin. As these three languages, amongst others, derive from a common source and share cognate forms, institutions, etc., so they also show elements of a poetic language that can often be proved to have been inherited from a common source, namely Indo-European (circa 4000BC). To exemplify this relationship and common inheritance, I propose to read closely a few of the hymns from the collection, above all those concerning the ancient myth of the dragon-slaying, which, following work by the American scholar Calvert Watkins, can be linked to such forms as heroic song in ancient Greece, as well as myth and saga in Anglo-Saxon England. However, I will focus on the Sanskrit evidence, and seek to explicate some of the formal techniques employed by the poets, especially concerning lexical fields, and derivational morphology.
The outcomes would include a closer appreciation of poetics in an ancient language; a clarification of inherited and innovated poetics, both in Sanskrit and in its wider relationship to Greek and Latin especially; and an exploration of some of the formal linguistic means by which the poets practised their craft. These means include, but are not limited to, the use of various meters, semantic relationships, and syntactic expressions, all of which characterize the respective poetic grammars.
This study I would disseminate primarily through a cross-disciplinary event I am organizing, jointly run between Classics (in which department I am enrolled), and South Asian Studies (for whom I currently run a group for grammar support in Sanskrit). The event is at the moment named ‘Sanskrit Day in Manchester’, and will include seminars on Sanskrit and Indo-European by Prof. David Langslow (dept. of Classics, Manchester), as well as sessions on reading hymns of the Rg-Veda, one of which I am co-teaching and in which I would be able to share some of the finds of my study. It should be emphasized that this event is being jointly organized, so the expected attendance will show a breadth of disciplines represented. This event will be coinciding with a conference on Sanskrit to be held the following day, namely the Sanskrit Tradition In The Modern World. Further discussion of my study within Manchester could be held in the undergraduate reading group for Classical languages, which I began and currently run, as well as at upcoming conferences and language schools I am to attend in Leiden, Netherlands, and Berlin, Germany.
Project Team: Jesse Lundquist Faculty: Humanities
Funding year: 2009
Keywords: undergraduate research vedic greek poetics linguistics classical languages
