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41796 results in Collections

Page 1914 of 2090

  • 8 - ENGLISH IN NEW ZEALAND

  • from PART II - English overseas
  • Edited by Robert Burchfield, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the English Language
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    17 November 1994, pp 382-429

  • Summary

    The language spoken in New Zealand at the time of the arrival of the Europeans was a Polynesian language Maori. This chapter presents description of present-day New Zealand English phonetics and phonology, and discusses the history of the pronunciation of English in New Zealand. It has generally been assumed that the morphology and syntax of New Zealand English is indistinguishable from that of British English. Most of the vocabulary that is found in New Zealand English is general to all varieties of English. Despite the fact that many New Zealanders have an ambivalent attitude to America and Americanisms, there are a number of Americanisms in New Zealand English which are normal, and a lot more which are stylistically marked. The chapter discusses the regional variations in New Zealand English, and suggests that the most likely origin of New Zealand English is as an exported variety of Australian English.

  • 9 - ENGLISH IN SOUTH AFRICA

  • from PART II - English overseas
  • Edited by Robert Burchfield, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the English Language
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    17 November 1994, pp 430-496

  • Summary

    Khoisan and Black languages have from early times provided an important input to South African English. The Black press and Black literature are growth points for all English-speaking South Africans. The South African accent, though its phonology contains elements traceable to particular dialects of English and contact languages, is clearly distinguishable from that of other 'transplanted' Englishes and reflects a unique system. In 1820 the English-speaking population was roughly doubled when between four and five thousand 'settlers' were helped by the British government to establish themselves in the Eastern Cape. This chapter samples some key areas of the vocabularies of human relationships and human types. The syntax of formal South African English approximates to that of formal standard British English. The importance of British models for South African English may relate in the first place to the minority status of English-speaking South Africans and secondly to the rather conservative political outlook of most whites among these.

  • 10 - ENGLISH IN SOUTH ASIA

  • from PART II - English overseas
  • Edited by Robert Burchfield, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the English Language
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    17 November 1994, pp 497-553

  • Summary

    The profile of English in the subcontinent is different from that in 1947 when the colonial period came to an end and the country was divided into India and Pakistan. In linguistic terms there are four major language families: Indo-Aryan, used by the majority of the population, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, and Munda. The formal introduction of English in South Asia has passed through several stages. What started as an educational debate in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries culminated in Lord Macaulay's much-maligned Minute of 1835, which initiated planned activity for introducing the English language into South Asian education. The major features which contribute to the distinctiveness of South Asian English are varied and complex. First, English is an additional language in South Asia; this means that in the total linguistic repertoire of the users of English, English may be a second, third, or n-th language. In grammar, British English continues to provide a yardstick for standardisation of South Asian English.

  • 5 - THE DIALECTS OF ENGLAND SINCE 1776

  • from PART I - Regional varieties of English in Great Britain and Ireland
  • Edited by Robert Burchfield, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the English Language
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    17 November 1994, pp 197-274

  • Summary

    Important early evidence for reconstructing dialect areas comes from dialect dictionaries. It would seem that from 1776 till the second half of the nineteenth century dialects were stable, and although regional English was seen as an obstacle to social advancement and as something to be avoided, there appears to have been no actual educational policy at work to create a unified 'polite' English, although there had been individual attempts to codify a spoken standard such as Sheridan and Walker. This chapter summarises the main dialect features that appear in the literature from the late eighteenth century up to about 1870. Most of the relevant sources were reprinted by the English Dialect Society in the late nineteenth century and are easily available. The English Dialect Society bibliography, which covers dialect texts and studies of dialect up to 1877, gives an idea of the amount of attention various regional varieties had attracted.

  • 1 - Introduction

  • Edited by Robert Burchfield, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the English Language
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    17 November 1994, pp 01-20

  • Summary

    This introductory chapter provides overview of the book and the subsequent chapters. The subsequent chapters give an account of the history and development of a number of distinct and highly diversified varieties of English those varieties in varying degrees are recognisably different from one another and from standard British and standard American English. In Wales and Ireland the retreat of the mother-tongue Celtic languages has been less dramatic but has followed the same general pattern. In each case an originally monolingual community, for social and political reasons, gradually acquired a second language, namely English, for commercial, administrative and other business. In due course the retreat of Welsh and Irish reached a point where the number of monolingual English speakers exceeded the number of bilingual speakers. The transported Englishes of three of the former British colonies, namely South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, were, to begin with, those of 'emigrant communities speaking several different dialects'.

  • 2 - ENGLISH IN SCOTLAND

  • from PART I - Regional varieties of English in Great Britain and Ireland
  • Edited by Robert Burchfield, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the English Language
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    17 November 1994, pp 21-93

  • Summary

    Insular West Germanic speech was first established in what is now Scotland in the sixth century. Uniquely among Old English-derived speech forms other than standard literary English, Scots has a claim to be regarded as a distinct language rather than a dialect, or latterly a group of dialects, of English. The distinction between Scots and Scottish English, which though not always clear in practice, is soundly based on historical facts. Germanic speech was established in what had been an area of Celtic language and culture. The growing complexity of the Scottish linguistic situation, with French and English emerging as functioning languages of the kingdom, can be deduced from official documents of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The chapter also discusses the spread of English in the Gaidhealtachd and the Northern Isles, and looks at phonology morphology, syntax, and dialect variation of Scottish English. Language adds a distinctive colouring to the contemporary Scottish cultural scene.

  • 4 - ENGLISH IN IRELAND

  • from PART I - Regional varieties of English in Great Britain and Ireland
  • Edited by Robert Burchfield, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the English Language
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    17 November 1994, pp 148-196

  • Summary

    A complex series of population movements and language contacts lies at the heart of the history of Irish English. Though the Viking presence in Ireland had little direct impact on the development of Irish English, the establishment of coastal towns was crucial for the development of relations between Ireland and the rest of Europe. It is convenient to separate the linguistic history of English in Ireland into two phases based on the external history: a medieval phase, leaving only traces in the archaic dialect of Forth and Bargy; and the modern phase based on the resurgence of English, including Scots, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Gaelic Society in 1807 and the subsequent development of a national Irish-language movement coincided with political movements for Irish independence to the extent that the language policy of the independent government established after the partition of Ireland in 1921-2 was firmly orientated towards the support of the Irish language.

  • 3 - ENGLISH IN WALES

  • from PART I - Regional varieties of English in Great Britain and Ireland
  • Edited by Robert Burchfield, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the English Language
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    17 November 1994, pp 94-147

  • Summary

    The social factors which brought about the dominance of English in Wales, and which have set in motion the process of language shift, have been political, economic and educational. The nineteenth century, culminating in the spread of formal primary education following the Education Act of 1888, was the period which saw the tipping of the linguistic scales in Wales. The English language functioned as the language of commerce, law, government and education, the major social institutions, admittedly, but Welsh had its prestigious institution in the Nonconformist religion of the chapels. The southern part of the old county of Pembrokeshire has been Anglicised since medieval times. In the south - particularly in the industrial south, in the Glamorgans - and in the eastern counties which border with England, there are already indigenous English dialects which have strong affinities with the English dialects of the west midlands and the south-west of England, superimposed on distinct substratal Welsh influences.

  • 2 - G. W. Leibniz, life and works

  • Edited by Nicholas Jolley, University of California, San Diego
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz
    Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    28 October 1994, pp 18-42

  • Summary

    Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 'was born at Leipzig on July 1, 1646 into a noble and academic family, the son of Friedrich Leibniz,' Professor of Moral Philosophy and Registrar of the University of Leipzig, and of Friedrich's third wife, Catharina Schmuck, the daughter of a Professor of Law. Leibniz lost his father in 1652 at the age of six, and his mother took charge of his education. He started school at seven, and, as soon as he knew enough Latin (which, Leibniz says, he taught himself at seven or eight), he was allowed into his father's library. There he undertook a vast reading of poets, orators, historians, jurists, philosophers, mathematicians, and theologians - from Livy and Clavisius to Cicero, Quintilian, Seneca, and Pliny, to Herodotus, Xenophon, and Plato, to the histories of the Roman Empire and the Fathers of the Church. His universal and assiduous reading made him knowledgable in almost every field.

  • 5 - Metaphysics: The late period

  • Edited by Nicholas Jolley, University of California, San Diego
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz
    Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    28 October 1994, pp 124-175

  • Summary

    Leibniz's late metaphysics is dominated by his theory of monads, a doctrine that posits that the only fully real beings are unextended, soul-like substances.' Since the seventeenth century, this theory has perplexed Leibniz's readers. Not only is the notion of the monad itself - a substance that is in his description “windowless”and “like a world of its own” - hard to fathom, but it is difficult to see how Leibniz means to integrate the doctrine of monads with a plausible account of the nature of matter and with his famous hypothesis of the preestablished harmony of soul and body.

    I begin by looking briefly at the relationship of Leibnizls late metaphysics to his earlier thought from the vantage point of his New System (I), a transitional work that will also serve to introduce us to the issues most central to his later period. Subsequent sections examine the details of the theory of monads (11), his reduction of matter to monads (111), and the status accorded by his late philosophy to the notions of soul-body union and corporeal substance (IV).

  • 11 - Perfection and happiness in the best possible world

  • Edited by Nicholas Jolley, University of California, San Diego
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz
    Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    28 October 1994, pp 382-410

  • Summary

    Since all possible things have a claim to existence in God's understanding in proportion to their perfections, the result of all these claims must be the most perfect actual world which is possible.

    (Leibniz, G V1 603:L 639)

    Candide, stunned, stupefied, despairing, bleeding, trembling, said to himself: -If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?

    (Voltaire)

    Few philosophical theses are so renowned as Leibniz's illustrious claim that this is the best of all possible worlds. Ironically, the doctrine's great fame is due more to the ridicule it received in Candide than to broad public familiarity with Leibniz's ideas. Even among philosophers well acquainted with Leibnizian texts, the subject of God's standards of perfection has only recently begun to receive detailed discussion. Yet these standards are essential to the meaning of the best possible world doctrine, and the place of humanity in the divine scheme is at the heart of Leibniz's treatment of the problem of evil. Consequently, it behooves us to ask what canons God invokes when he compares possible worlds, and in what ways these standards affect the prospects for human well-being.

Page 1914 of 2090