Week of October 19

Jane Loney Presents at NELS

This weekend, graduate student Jane Loney presented at the NELS (North East Linguistic Society) conference in New York. Her poster titled "LDA without Movement in Zulu" was based on her syntactic research on cross-clausal operations in Zulu.

Workshop in IE and Historical Linguistics

The first talk in the Indo-European and Historical Linguistics workshop will be held this Thursday, October 22, at 5:15pm in Boylston 237. We will be joined by Rex Wallace (UMass Amherst), who will present on "The Sabellic Languages of Pre-Roman Campania". Those wishing to attend virtually should contact Felix Montgomery for the Zoom link.

Abstract: In the period before Roman expansion, ancient Italy was home to a diverse array of languages and cultures. In southern Italy, in the territory of Campania, the languages spoken before Roman expansion were Etruscan, Euboean Greek, and the Sabellic languages Pre-Samnite and Oscan. This lecture, which is organized into several sections, has as its prime topics the Pre-Samnite inscriptions recovered from the Sorrentine peninsula, which date to the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, and the Oscan inscriptions recovered from Pompeii, which date to the 4th century BCE and later. The examination of the Pre-Samnite and Oscan inscriptions also includes observations on the alphabets and writing systems, and on the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the languages. The lecture includes a review of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family and presents groups of phonological, morphological, and lexical correspondences illustrating the linguistic relationship of Oscan and Latin.