Stefan Georg | Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn (original) (raw)
Non-publications by Stefan Georg
Too abstract for an abstract. A rant, maybe. Sort of, at least. Certainly not a very ingenious ti... more Too abstract for an abstract. A rant, maybe. Sort of, at least. Certainly not a very ingenious title, certainly too verbose, certainly not publishable. Certainly necessary. Certainly useless.
Books by Stefan Georg
This new four-volume collection from Routledge brings together the major works of scholarship con... more This new four-volume collection from Routledge brings together the major works of scholarship concerned with the ‘language isolates’ of the world. ‘Isolated’ languages are languages without any known relatives, languages which are not demonstrably part of any ‘language family’, with Etruscan, Basque, and Ainu being arguably some of the best-known examples of such ‘linguistic orphans’. The language-specific materials collected here are arranged geographically, and each language-chapter is preceded by a short introduction to the linguistic situation of the language(es) involved and, if not given in anthologized works themselves, to the current state of research and past and present scholarly debates. The volumes are preceded by a problem-oriented general introduction, which deals with the basic concepts and methodological principles of language classification, the present state and the nature of ongoing controversies, an epistemiological typology of language families, and, in the light of this, a theoretical justification of the concept of isolates as well as the choice of languages covered in the volumes.
Some of the gathered works are general introductions to their object language (in terms of sociolinguistics, attestation, documentation, history of scholarship, guides to published studies, overviews of linguistic characteristics), others highlight and discuss particularly salient and interesting typological characteristics of an isolate (some of them are breakthrough studies for the understanding of a particular language), and others focus on the very status of the language under discussion as an isolate in the first place. Some isolated languages are still very much alive; at least one of them, Korean, is a major national language. The majority of the languages and small families covered here are endangered, and some will certainly cease to be used during the coming decades. Thus, isolated languages are particularly interesting objects for students of language endangerment, but they are also prime research objects for linguistic descriptionists, for, when they are gone, not only will another of the 6,000 or so human languages have disappeared, but, in those cases, whole linguistic lineages (and their ways of coping with the world) will be gone forever.
A Descriptive Grammar of Ket (Yenisei-Ostyak), Jan 1, 2007
Linguists and specialists on Siberia are generally familiar with the name Ket, which designates a... more Linguists and specialists on Siberia are generally familiar with the name Ket, which designates a small ethnic group on the Yenisei and their language, widely regarded as a linguistic enigma in many respects. Ket is a severely endangered language with today ...
Papers by Stefan Georg
The Uralic Languages, 2023
WOL 10, 2024
What the title says...
This short note serves the purpose of setting the record of the decipherment of the Mongolian Khü... more This short note serves the purpose of setting the record of the decipherment of the Mongolian Khüis Tolgoi and Bugut inscriptions straight. Until recently, the Brāhmī inscriptions on the Khüis Tolgoi and Bugut stelae in Mongolia remained undeciphered, and any knowledge concerning the language in which they were written had been lost centuries ago. Finally, in the 2000s, Dieter Maue, an epigraphist and a leading specialist on the Brāhmī script, made a new reading of the inscriptions, allowing, for the first time, the question concerning the underlying language to be approached in a meaningful way. Then, the French historian Étienne de La Vaissière invited Alexander Vovin, during the latter's visit to Paris, to have a look at Maue's reading of the Khüis Tolgoi inscription. Vovin recognized the language as Mongolic, but there were still too many unidentifiable words and grammatical forms to allow for a complete translation. In 2014, an international team consisting of Dieter Maue (Germany), Alexander Vovin (USA, then already permanently working in France), Mehmet Ölmez (Turkey), and Étienne de La Vaissière (France) was formed, and the group travelled to Mongolia, accompanied by two specialists in 3D photography with the relevant instruments for taking 3D pictures. The principal objective was to document the inscriptions as completely as possible. The team surveyed the inscriptions and took 3D pictures of the Khüis Tolgoi I and Brāhmī Bugut inscriptions, but could not do the same with Khüis Tolgoi II due to circumstances beyond the team's control. For more details on the team's travel to Mongolia, see Ölmez (2018). After the survey, Dieter Maue revised his epigraphic analysis and Alexander Vovin offered a first linguistic analysis and interpretation of the texts. The results were reported at the
T. Osada/A. Vovin (edd.): 日本語の系統論えの展望 Perspectives on the Origins of the Japanese Language, Kyot... more T. Osada/A. Vovin (edd.): 日本語の系統論えの展望 Perspectives on the
Origins of the Japanese Language, Kyoto: Kokusai Nihon Bunka Kenkyu
Senta/ International Center for Japanese Studies
An old paper. A really old and youthful paper. I removed it from this site some years ago, when its very existence (or, then, mine) sparked an amount of open contempt, even hatred, which I couldn't expect even in the hotly polemic field of "Altaic" linguistics. And, yes, it contains (at least) one mistake - according to a particularly prolific poster (poseur?) on academia.edu nothing less than the one major sin of the whole discipline ever since 1836 or so. Unforgivable, and reason enough to try to whatever might be humanly possible to expel its perpetrator from this field (and, congrats, with full success!). It is a really big, a really abominable blunder. See if you can spot it (because I forgot, but it sure is there, still after all these years, it must be). And, of course (as if this would have to be underlined, but alas, it has!) every bit of this comes from my own ailing head, including, of course, every slip, and every blunder.
Diachronica, Dec 31, 2003
L'A. revient dans cette etude critique sur le dernier ouvrage de Joseph H. Greenberg, Indo-Eu... more L'A. revient dans cette etude critique sur le dernier ouvrage de Joseph H. Greenberg, Indo-European and its closest relatives : The Eurasiatic language family (2000), ou ce dernier tente de rassembler dans une meme famille linguistique plus importante (a savoir le groupe eurasiatique) les langues indo-europeennes, 'altaiques' et autres familles de langues du vieux monde. Les principales critiques adressees a Greenberg concernent sa methode de comparaison de masses des langues en question, son traitement des donnees, qui consiste en une comparaison 'multilaterale' de la similarite de surface, portant peu d'importance a la regularite phonologique. L'A. analyse plus particulierement les parametres morphologiques pris en compte par Greenberg pour sa classification.
Journal of Language Contact, May 19, 2017
International Journal of American Linguistics, 2001
Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, May 13, 2013
International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics, 2021
Iran and the Caucasus, 2015
Iran and the Caucasus 19, 2015, 3-7
Too abstract for an abstract. A rant, maybe. Sort of, at least. Certainly not a very ingenious ti... more Too abstract for an abstract. A rant, maybe. Sort of, at least. Certainly not a very ingenious title, certainly too verbose, certainly not publishable. Certainly necessary. Certainly useless.
This new four-volume collection from Routledge brings together the major works of scholarship con... more This new four-volume collection from Routledge brings together the major works of scholarship concerned with the ‘language isolates’ of the world. ‘Isolated’ languages are languages without any known relatives, languages which are not demonstrably part of any ‘language family’, with Etruscan, Basque, and Ainu being arguably some of the best-known examples of such ‘linguistic orphans’. The language-specific materials collected here are arranged geographically, and each language-chapter is preceded by a short introduction to the linguistic situation of the language(es) involved and, if not given in anthologized works themselves, to the current state of research and past and present scholarly debates. The volumes are preceded by a problem-oriented general introduction, which deals with the basic concepts and methodological principles of language classification, the present state and the nature of ongoing controversies, an epistemiological typology of language families, and, in the light of this, a theoretical justification of the concept of isolates as well as the choice of languages covered in the volumes.
Some of the gathered works are general introductions to their object language (in terms of sociolinguistics, attestation, documentation, history of scholarship, guides to published studies, overviews of linguistic characteristics), others highlight and discuss particularly salient and interesting typological characteristics of an isolate (some of them are breakthrough studies for the understanding of a particular language), and others focus on the very status of the language under discussion as an isolate in the first place. Some isolated languages are still very much alive; at least one of them, Korean, is a major national language. The majority of the languages and small families covered here are endangered, and some will certainly cease to be used during the coming decades. Thus, isolated languages are particularly interesting objects for students of language endangerment, but they are also prime research objects for linguistic descriptionists, for, when they are gone, not only will another of the 6,000 or so human languages have disappeared, but, in those cases, whole linguistic lineages (and their ways of coping with the world) will be gone forever.
A Descriptive Grammar of Ket (Yenisei-Ostyak), Jan 1, 2007
Linguists and specialists on Siberia are generally familiar with the name Ket, which designates a... more Linguists and specialists on Siberia are generally familiar with the name Ket, which designates a small ethnic group on the Yenisei and their language, widely regarded as a linguistic enigma in many respects. Ket is a severely endangered language with today ...
The Uralic Languages, 2023
WOL 10, 2024
What the title says...
This short note serves the purpose of setting the record of the decipherment of the Mongolian Khü... more This short note serves the purpose of setting the record of the decipherment of the Mongolian Khüis Tolgoi and Bugut inscriptions straight. Until recently, the Brāhmī inscriptions on the Khüis Tolgoi and Bugut stelae in Mongolia remained undeciphered, and any knowledge concerning the language in which they were written had been lost centuries ago. Finally, in the 2000s, Dieter Maue, an epigraphist and a leading specialist on the Brāhmī script, made a new reading of the inscriptions, allowing, for the first time, the question concerning the underlying language to be approached in a meaningful way. Then, the French historian Étienne de La Vaissière invited Alexander Vovin, during the latter's visit to Paris, to have a look at Maue's reading of the Khüis Tolgoi inscription. Vovin recognized the language as Mongolic, but there were still too many unidentifiable words and grammatical forms to allow for a complete translation. In 2014, an international team consisting of Dieter Maue (Germany), Alexander Vovin (USA, then already permanently working in France), Mehmet Ölmez (Turkey), and Étienne de La Vaissière (France) was formed, and the group travelled to Mongolia, accompanied by two specialists in 3D photography with the relevant instruments for taking 3D pictures. The principal objective was to document the inscriptions as completely as possible. The team surveyed the inscriptions and took 3D pictures of the Khüis Tolgoi I and Brāhmī Bugut inscriptions, but could not do the same with Khüis Tolgoi II due to circumstances beyond the team's control. For more details on the team's travel to Mongolia, see Ölmez (2018). After the survey, Dieter Maue revised his epigraphic analysis and Alexander Vovin offered a first linguistic analysis and interpretation of the texts. The results were reported at the
T. Osada/A. Vovin (edd.): 日本語の系統論えの展望 Perspectives on the Origins of the Japanese Language, Kyot... more T. Osada/A. Vovin (edd.): 日本語の系統論えの展望 Perspectives on the
Origins of the Japanese Language, Kyoto: Kokusai Nihon Bunka Kenkyu
Senta/ International Center for Japanese Studies
An old paper. A really old and youthful paper. I removed it from this site some years ago, when its very existence (or, then, mine) sparked an amount of open contempt, even hatred, which I couldn't expect even in the hotly polemic field of "Altaic" linguistics. And, yes, it contains (at least) one mistake - according to a particularly prolific poster (poseur?) on academia.edu nothing less than the one major sin of the whole discipline ever since 1836 or so. Unforgivable, and reason enough to try to whatever might be humanly possible to expel its perpetrator from this field (and, congrats, with full success!). It is a really big, a really abominable blunder. See if you can spot it (because I forgot, but it sure is there, still after all these years, it must be). And, of course (as if this would have to be underlined, but alas, it has!) every bit of this comes from my own ailing head, including, of course, every slip, and every blunder.
Diachronica, Dec 31, 2003
L'A. revient dans cette etude critique sur le dernier ouvrage de Joseph H. Greenberg, Indo-Eu... more L'A. revient dans cette etude critique sur le dernier ouvrage de Joseph H. Greenberg, Indo-European and its closest relatives : The Eurasiatic language family (2000), ou ce dernier tente de rassembler dans une meme famille linguistique plus importante (a savoir le groupe eurasiatique) les langues indo-europeennes, 'altaiques' et autres familles de langues du vieux monde. Les principales critiques adressees a Greenberg concernent sa methode de comparaison de masses des langues en question, son traitement des donnees, qui consiste en une comparaison 'multilaterale' de la similarite de surface, portant peu d'importance a la regularite phonologique. L'A. analyse plus particulierement les parametres morphologiques pris en compte par Greenberg pour sa classification.
Journal of Language Contact, May 19, 2017
International Journal of American Linguistics, 2001
Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, May 13, 2013
International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics, 2021
Iran and the Caucasus, 2015
Iran and the Caucasus 19, 2015, 3-7
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2019
Journal of Language Contact
Paradigmatic morphology is a central and crucial concept for several branches of comparative ling... more Paradigmatic morphology is a central and crucial concept for several branches of comparative linguistics. The observation of shared paradigms in languages which were not suspected of having a common ancestry stands at the cradle of modern genealogical linguistics and dominates the discussion(s) about not firmly established or merely putative language families or phyla to this day, the very different morphological techniques different languages use for the formation of paradigms mark the beginning of language typology, now a major pillar of the language sciences, and the question, to which degree languages—closely, distantly, or not at all related with each other—may borrow morphological paradigms (part or whole) from each other or might have done so in the past (which, if true and not properly detected, might lead to superficially persuasive, but factually erroneous, claims and hypotheses of genealogical relatedness) continues to be an important theoretical and practical issue in co...
Orientalistische Literaturzeitung, 2016
International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics
Review of the said work, forthcoming
With my profuse apologies to everybody who rightfully expects original works of scholarship here,... more With my profuse apologies to everybody who rightfully expects original works of scholarship here, but certain events on some pages of academia.edu force me, so I think, to post this statement at this place.
- As an addition, I might mention here that I find myself, on some page of academia.edu, which, again, I will not mention explicitly here (sapienti sat), actually *stalked* by somebody who, in the defense of some hypothesis I took the liberty to voice dissident opinions on in the past, now seems to have enough time and energy to scavenge each and every scrap of my published writings, sometimes from decades ago, and sometimes without any circulation to speak of, in order to unearth inaccuracies of any kind (and, yes, indeed, the undersigned is not infallible, so the search will and is not in vain, I am confident that I'm in pretty good company with that), which are then presented as "pinnacles" of a debate and, of course, then reduced to rubbles with bombastic rhetoric. At times, this is even funny (for lovers of grand opera and kitschy drama, that is), but it should perhaps be added that *any* hypothesis on *anything* which needs to be defended *this way* is in dire straits, and very obviously so.
Whether what I attacked some decades ago will stand or fall is not up to me to decide and should be left to those who actually care, but I must say that I'm quite astonished to find that the supporters (OK, to be fair: at least one of them, I have not found many others from the "other camp" to be willing to sink that low) of that ominous hypothesis seem to feel that it needs *such a* shot in the arm. Not even I thought that it is in such a precarious state of health, maybe somebody should help it up, so I might, one day, find time, energy and, above all, inclination, to voice a few more dissident opinions on it.