Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics

📣The programme for the 4th AMC Symposium on Contact and Language Change is now online!
📅2-4 December, The University of Edinburgh
Registration is now open!

Fourth AMC Symposium (2024) – Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics The fourth AMC Symposium will take place on 2-4 December 2024. It will be held in-person in Edinburgh. Registration is now open. The theme of the Symposium is Contact and language change Background Contact between languages and between dialects has long been known to lead to change. The extent to...

📢 Second CfP
Fourth AMC Symposium: "Contact and language change"
Abstracts: 30 April
Symposium: 2-4 December 2024
https://www.amc.lel.ed.ac.uk/amc-symposium/fourth-amc-symposium/call-for-papers/
Just two weeks left to submit your abstracts and come and spend a few days talking historical linguistics with us at Edinburgh!

📢The call for papers for the Fourth AMC Symposium is now open!
This Symposium's theme is "Contact and language change"
Our six invited speakers have been asked to address the theme in their plenaries. While we particularly encourage abstracts for regular talks and posters that engage with the key symposium questions, we also welcome abstracts on any topic in historical linguistics, including all language specialisms and sub-disciplines.
📆Key dates:
Abstract deadline: 30 April
Notification: 15 June
Conference: 2-4 December
We hope to see many of you in Edinburgh!
https://www.amc.lel.ed.ac.uk/amc-symposium/fourth-amc-symposium/call-for-papers/

Amazing use of Transkribus and stylistics!

Artificial intelligence uncovers lost work by titan of Spain’s ‘Golden Age’ Discovery of Lope de Vega play could lead to other important finds, researchers say

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/ems-palaeography

Scottish History Through Handwriting - Online Course - FutureLearn Travel back in time through Scottish history by examining early modern Scottish handwriting with this online palaeography course from University of Glasgow.

For those who would like to contribute in memory of Meg.

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/inmemoryofmeg

In Memory of Meg Laing Help The Laing Family raise money to support Theirworld

“Cut Out and Stuck In: Fragments of Medieval Manuscripts in Nineteenth-Century Albums”

Hybrid event, 19 January 18:00-19:00 GMT

https://www.socantscot.org/event/january-lecture-cut-out-and-stuck-in-fragments-of-medieval-manuscripts-in-nineteenth-century-albums/?fbclid=IwAR2Uys-5fmHK1x0hCx6sHbgdqLeipMsPWK7gCXTcigzpdN07db8b9n0hMiw

Upcoming Events | January Lecture: “‘Cut Out and Stuck In: Fragments of Medieval Manuscripts in Nineteenth-Century Albums” | Society of Antiquaries of Scotland This will be a hybrid event hosted by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland which will take place both in Augustine United Church and online. Immediately after the lecture there will be a drinks reception.

We’re reaching out to convey some very sad news. We have heard today that our dear friend, colleague and AMC Honorary Member, Meg Laing, passed away suddenly due to a stroke. While she had recently spent several months in hospital following an infection, she was well enough to go home mid December, and spent Christmas with her family. The subsequent stroke was completely unexpected.

Meg was a research fellow at Edinburgh for her entire academic career until her retirement in 2013. She was a prolific and groundbreaking scholar. To those of us who knew her, however, she was also a singularly warm, enthusiastic and generous human being who will be sorely missed.

“The deciphering of the markings pushes back the date for the earliest known proto-writing by 14,000 years to at least 20,000 years ago.”

Mystery of ancient dots and stripes on Europe's caves is solved — The Telegraph Archaeologists believe wave of discoveries set to tumble forth as code cracked by work of pioneering amateur

Hand of Irulegi: ancient Spanish artefact could help trace origins of Basque language The Vascones, an iron age tribe from whose language modern Basque is thought to descend, previously viewed as largely illiterate

📣Registration is now open for the Third AMC Symposium on the theme of "Change in syntax and phonology: the same or different?"
5-7 December – Edinburgh University

Third AMC Symposium (2022) – Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics The third AMC Symposium will take place on 5-7 December 2022. It will be held in-person (with no hybrid option) in Edinburgh (if COVID restrictions return, we will switch to online). The theme of the Symposium is Change in syntax and phonology: the same or different? What is the locus of linguistic....

Wendy Scase, Visible English: Graphic Culture, Scribal Practice, and Identity, c. 700-c. 1550 (Brepols, October 2022)

https://www.brepols.net/products/IS-9782503598420-1

Visible English recovers for the first time the experience of reading and writing the English language in the medieval period through the perspectives of littera pedagogy, the basis of medieval learning and teaching of literate skills in Latin. Littera is at the heart of the set of theories and practices that constitute the ‘graphic culture’ of the book’s title. The book shows for the first time that littera pedagogy was an ‘us and them’ discourse that functioned as a vehicle for identity formation. Using littera pedagogy as a framework for understanding the medieval English-language corpus from the point of view of the readers and writers who produced it, Visible English offers new insights on experiences of writing and reading English in communities ranging from those first in contact with Latin literacy to those where print was an alternative to manuscript. Discussing a broad range of materials from so-called ‘pen-trials’ and graffiti to key literary manuscripts, Visible English provides new perspectives on the ways that the alphabet was understood, on genres such as alphabet poems, riddles, and scribal signatures, and on the different ways in which scribes copied Old and Middle English texts. It argues that the graphic culture underpinned and transmitted by littera pedagogy provided frameworks for the development and understanding of English-language literacy practices and new ways of experiencing social belonging and difference. To be literate in English, it proposes, was to inhabit identities marked by Anglophone literate practices.