Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century

Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century
Author: M. M. Slaughter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 1982-09-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0521244773

Examines highly regarded proposals during the seventeenth century for an artificial language intended to replace Latin as the international medium of communication.

A Harmony of the Spirits

A Harmony of the Spirits
Author: Patrick M. Erben
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2013-06-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807838195

In early Pennsylvania, translation served as a utopian tool creating harmony across linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences. Patrick Erben challenges the long-standing historical myth--first promulgated by Benjamin Franklin--that language diversity posed a threat to communal coherence. He deftly traces the pansophist and Neoplatonist philosophies of European reformers that informed the radical English and German Protestants who founded the "holy experiment." Their belief in hidden yet persistent links between human language and the word of God impelled their vision of a common spiritual idiom. Translation became the search for underlying correspondences between diverse human expressions of the divine and served as a model for reconciliation and inclusiveness. Drawing on German and English archival sources, Erben examines iconic translations that engendered community in colonial Pennsylvania, including William Penn's translingual promotional literature, Francis Daniel Pastorius's multilingual poetics, Ephrata's "angelic" singing and transcendent calligraphy, the Moravians' polyglot missions, and the common language of suffering for peace among Quakers, Pietists, and Mennonites. By revealing a mystical quest for unity, Erben presents a compelling counternarrative to monolingualism and Enlightenment empiricism in eighteenth-century America.

Ashgate Critical Essays on Early English Lexicographers

Ashgate Critical Essays on Early English Lexicographers
Author: John Considine
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 655
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351870254

Three major developments in English lexicography took place during the seventeenth century: the emergence of the first free standing monolingual English dictionaries; the making of new kinds of English lexicons that investigated dialect or etymology or that keyed English to invented 'philosophical' languages; and the massive expansion of bilingual lexicography, which not only placed English alongside the European vernaculars but also handled the languages of the new world. The essays in this volume discuss not only the internal history of lexicography but also its wider relationships with culture and society.

The Francis Daniel Pastorius Reader

The Francis Daniel Pastorius Reader
Author: Patrick Erben
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2020-02-26
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0271083867

Francis Daniel Pastorius was one of the first German settlers to Pennsylvania and a touchstone figure of German-American cultural heritage. This monumental anthology presents a selection of his many writings in one volume. Pastorius sailed to North America as a Pietist but found a unique home among the Quakers in Pennsylvania. Within this early modern religious context, he was a lawyer, educator, and community leader; a polymath; and a prolific writer and collector of knowledge. At the turn of the eighteenth century, Pastorius held one of the largest manuscript collections in North America and wrote voluminously in multiple languages. His collecting, curation, and dissemination represents a unique look at the ways information was stored, processed, and utilized during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in both North America and Europe. This rich selection of Pastorius’s writings on religion, education, gardening, law and community, and the colony of Pennsylvania—as well as letters, poems, and numerous encyclopedic and bibliographic works—shows the mind of a true humanist in action. Pastorius’s works have long been important to the archival study of early German settlement and the Atlantic world. Now available together, transcribed, translated, and annotated, his writings will have widespread significance to the study of early American literature and history.

Milton’s Inward Liberty

Milton’s Inward Liberty
Author: Filippo Falcone
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2014-08-19
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1630874930

What is true liberty? Milton labors to provide an answer, and his answer becomes the ruling principle behind both prose works and poetry. The scholarly community has largely read liberty in Milton retrospectively through the spectacles of liberalism. In so doing, it has failed to emphasize that the Christian paradigm of liberty speaks of an inward microcosm, a place of freedom whose precincts are defined by man's fellowship with God. All other forms of freedom relate to the outer world, be they freedom to choose the good, absence of external constraint and oppression, or freedom of alternatives. None of these is true liberty, but they are pursued by Milton in concert with true liberty. Milton's Inward Liberty attempts to address the bearing of true liberty in Milton's work through the magnifying glass of seventeenth-century theology.

John Milton

John Milton
Author: Gordon Campbell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 507
Release: 2010-11-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0199591032

The first biography of Milton based on original research for 40 years, and first to take account of new thinking about 17th-century England. Milton is seen here as flawed, passionate, ruthless, and ambitious, as well as one of the most accomplished writers of the time and author of the most influential narrative poem in English.

A History of ELT, Second Edition

A History of ELT, Second Edition
Author: A.P.R. Howatt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2004-06-03
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780194421850

Providing an introduction, this work contains sections on the British Empire.

On Being Human(e)

On Being Human(e)
Author: Jan Hábl
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2017-02-21
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1532600577

There is a difference between that which is and that which is to be. Anthropologically: there is a way I am, and the way I am to be, or not to be. How are we to explain this? This book presents the argument that human nature is both complex and complicated in at least two specific ways--ontologically and ethically. In our being we are indisputably good, dignified, worthy, important, or even noble. But in our morality we are ambivalent--capable of both good and evil, the humane and the inhumane. In his paramount work Jan Amos Comenius expresses the goal of his lifelong endeavor: "to help keep man from falling into a non-man" (Pampaedia). If human beings are to become what they ought to be, they need to be educated towards humanity, says Comenius. But the fundamental question is, what is a human being? And what ought one to be? "Salt ought to be salty. A river ought to be clear. A knife ought to be sharp. But what ought a person to be?" What is the essence of our humanity? And how can that be cultivated or educated? This book presents Comenius's answers to these questions.