Glossing was an important element of medieval western manuscript culture. However, glosses are notoriously difficult to analyze because of their triviality, fluid nature, heterogeneity of origin, complex transmission histories, and anonymity. Traditional scholarly approaches such as close reading and the genealogical method often do not produce…[Read more]

Elodie Paillard, ‘Greek Theatre in Roman Italy: From Elite to Autocratic Performances’, in E. Csapo, H.R. Goette, J. R. Green, B. Le Guen, E. Paillard, J. Stoop, P. Wilson, Theatre and Autocracy in the Ancient World, De Gruyter, 2022

This book explores the staging of non-élite characters in the seven extant tragedies of Sophocles and how they related to contemporary middling citizens. The structure of fifth-century Athenian society underwent deep changes between the early and late plays of Sophocles. The appearance and growing political importance of a middling…[Read more]

The Norse poem Atlakviða shows an irregular metre which is difficult to classify. This makes it a useful test case for comparing the explanatory abilities of two major theoretical frameworks of Germanic alliterative verse: the positional theory and the word-foot theory. I argue that the word-foot theory is more successful, especially in deriving…[Read more]

The Norse poem Atlakviða shows an irregular metre which is difficult to classify. This makes it a useful test case for comparing the explanatory abilities of two major theoretical frameworks of Germanic alliterative verse: the positional theory and the word-foot theory. I argue that the word-foot theory is more successful, especially in deriving…[Read more]

This article is a report of a roundtable discussion organised by the authors at the UK Classical Association conference, Cambridge, April 2023, under the aegis of #WCCWiki, the Women’s Classical Committee’s Wikipedia-editing project. It presents a summary of the participants’ wide-ranging uses of Wikipedia editing at schools, universities, and…[Read more]

An overview of the dialect of Old English used by Tolkien to represent the language of Rohan. I argue that Tolkien chose the dialect represented by the early glossaries in Old Mercian, especially the eighth-century Corpus Glossary, as representatives of the kind of Old English he thought Beowulf was originally composed in.

An overview of the dialect of Old English used by Tolkien to represent the language of Rohan. I argue that Tolkien chose the dialect represented by the early glossaries in Old Mercian, especially the eighth-century Corpus Glossary, as representatives of the kind of Old English he thought Beowulf was originally composed in.

This is the final post of a series of 12 blog posts discussing 10 open problems in computational diversity linguistics.

This is the eleventh of a series of 12 blog posts published in 2019, discussing open problems in computational diversity linguistics. It discusses the typology of semantic promiscuity.

This is the tenth of a series of 12 blog posts published in 2019, discussing open problems in computational diversity linguistics. It discusses the typology of sound change.

This is the ninth of a series of 12 blog posts published in 2019, discussing open problems in computational diversity linguistics. It discusses the typology of semantic change.

This is the eighth of a series of 12 blog posts published in 2019, discussing open problems in computational diversity linguistics. It discusses the problem of statistical proof of language relatedness.

This is the seventh of a series of 12 blog posts published in 2019, discussing open problems in computational diversity linguistics. It discusses the problem of simulating sound change.

This is the sixth of a series of 12 blog posts published in 2019, discussing open problems in computational diversity linguistics. It discusses the problem of simulating lexical change.

This is the fifth of a series of 12 blog posts published in 2019, discussing open problems in computational diversity linguistics. It discusses the problem of automatic phonological reconstruction.

This is the fourth of a series of 12 blog posts published in 2019, discussing open problems in computational diversity linguistics. It discusses the problem of automatic sound law induction.

This is the third of a series of 12 blog posts published in 2019, discussing open problems in computational diversity linguistics. It discusses the problem of automatic borrowing detection.

This is the second of a series of 12 blog posts published in 2019, discussing open problems in computational diversity linguistics. It presents the problem of automatic morpheme segmentation.