Linguistics Calendar - Past Events for this Academic Year

The Hungarian Language: Past and Present

Invited Speakers

Donka Farkas (UC Santa Cruz) Marcel den Dikken (CUNY) Marianne Bakro-Nagy (U Szeged & Hungarian Academy of Sciences) Anna Fenyvesi (U Szeged) Laszlo Hunyadi (U Debrecen):

Information is made available at http://kracht.humnet.ucla.edu/hun06 Contact: {jdomokos, kracht}@humnet.ucla.edu

-- submitted by Kathryn Roberts (kroberts@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact jdomokos@humnet.ucla.edu; kracht@humnet.ucla.edu

Public Lecture: Anna Fenyvesi (University of Szeged): The many faces of Hungarian: Sociolinguistic findings on contact varieties

May 5, 1648 Hershey Hall, 2pm.

-- submitted by (kroberts@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact jdomokos@humnet.ucla.edu; kracht@humnet.ucla.edu

‘They have forgotten their language and speak the language of the hijra’ Reconsidering the fate of Coptic after the Arab conquest

Arietta Papaconstantinou (Dumbarton Oaks)

‘They have forgotten their language and speak the language of the hijra’ - Reconsidering the fate of Coptic after the Arab conquest

Abstract: When the Arab general ‘Amr ibn al-As conquered Egypt in 642CE, he subjugated a Christian country where proficiency in the native tongue – called Coptic – and in Greek was the norm. Despite the gradual introduction of Arabic in Egyptian society the subsequent first two centuries of Arab rule were among the most productive in terms of original Coptic literature, and the form and content of those texts have much to say about the self-definition of the Egyptian Christian communities during that period. However, even though ecclesiastical authors in Egypt did not start using Arabic until the tenth century, when they did start they almost completely abandoned Coptic as a writing language. Over the following two centuries, Egyptian gradually disappeared as a spoken language as well, so that by the thirteenth century, Coptic was only used in formal ritual contexts, primarily the liturgy. Although Arabicization was widespread among the Christian communities of the Middle East, only Coptic was eventually fully supplanted by Arabic, thus bringing a longstanding tradition of multilingualism within the country to an end. It is remarkable how few attempts have been made to explain this language shift and those few suggestions mostly focus on linguistic and religious aspects, or rest on biased premises. However, recent work on the sources of the period is opening up an avenue for a renewed approach, which involves examining more closely the stages of this development and taking into consideration the broader historical context within which this extraordinary language shift took place.

Short bio: Arietta Papaconstantinou has currently a leave of absence from the Collège de France in Paris and works as a fellow in Byzantine Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington DC on a project entitled “The Rise and Fall of Coptic: a Cultural History of the Language and its Speakers”. She is a specialist in Coptic and Byzantine studies, both as a philologist and cultural historian, as exemplified by her book Le culte des saints en Égypte des Byzantins aux Abbassides. L’apport des inscriptions et des papyrus grecs et coptes, collection "Le monde byzantin", CNRS Éditions, Paris 2001.

-- submitted by Jacco Dieleman (dieleman@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact dieleman@humnet.ucla.edu