The transmission of early scientific writing: Mari-Liisa Varila’s doctoral defence

Posted on June 14, 2016 by elmava

It is always a happy occasion for the whole department when a doctoral candidate defends their dissertation. This spring we were treated to not only one but two public examinations of doctoral dissertations. The first was that of Mari-Liisa Varila. On 28 May 2016, she defended her dissertation titled “In search of textual boundaries: A case study on the transmission of scientific writing in 16th-century England”.

Varila’s study concentrates on the text-production practices of scribes and compilers as they copied scientific (in this case, mostly astrological) texts in manuscript form. Early scientific writing has not been researched as much as the extant material would merit; nor has book production in the early sixteenth century been studied extensively, especially the production of manuscript books. Varila’s study helps to bridge both of these gaps in research. Her primary material consists of three English manuscripts including mostly scientific texts. These manuscripts have not been studied in detail before.

The opponent was Daniel Wakelin, Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Palaeography at the University of Oxford. Professor Matti Peikola acted as custos. Wakelin and Varila engaged in a lively, intriguing discussion on matters scribal, textual and material. The enthusiasm with which both the opponent and the candidate participated in the discussion was palpable to the audience. Wakelin commended Varila on her innovative approach, which combines several disciplines in order to present an accurate picture of her manuscript material and conclusions.

The combination of approaches including manuscript studies, textual scholarship and historical discourse linguistics allows Varila to look at her material in novel ways and to understand the broader contexts behind the manuscripts’ production. She concludes that early scientific texts and works are often flexible in their boundaries. Scribes could copy selectively and the information content was often more important than the linguistic form. Material features are important: the constraints of the physical page can affect the texts being copied. Varila also shows that the connections between manuscripts and early printed material are a fruitful object of study. We were happy to attend such a successful examination, a fitting finale for the years of hard work!

Text by Sara Norja & Aino Liira
Photos by Miikka Varila

SLT historical linguistics seminar 13.5 – Winding through the dusty deserts of a lush philology, pt 2

Posted on June 9, 2016 by elmava

The seminar continued with the Department of Finnish and Finno-Ugric languages revealing its onomastic side, as we heard presentations from Kirsi-Maria Nummila and Regina Bűdi. Nummila studies medieval street names in Turku and the credit that is their due to Baltic Sea region city plans or the so called German city plan. This city plan seems to have been variously implemented by some big East-European cities like Stockholm, Turku, and Tallinn, and these cities, interestingly, share street names. In her research, Nummila has questioned the traditional view that medieval street names were formed quite spontaneously drawing from the functions and situation of the street, and suggests that they might rather have been borrowed along with the city plan. Bűdi studies the proper names in the Turku bishop Ericus Erici Sorolainen’s sermon collection (Postilla 1621/1625), and more precisely in its gospel text passages. She compares these proper names to the ones found in corresponding passages in Mikael Agricola’s New Testament (1548) and the first Finnish whole Bible (1642), as well as in mainly sixteenth-century German, Latin, Greek, and Swedish translations of the Bible. Her aim is to study the similarities and differences between the proper names from these sources, the degree to which Sorolainen’s proper names were impacted by foreign languages and historical language development, and the gradual assimilation of foreign personal names into Finnish. She also wants to specify the definition of some nouns that could be seen as both common and proper nouns.

Asta Rauhala from the Department of Scandinavian Languages presented her doctoral research that concerns early, thirteenth- to seventeenth-century, Swedish loans into Finnish. Rauhala’s goal is to discover the scope and semantic categories of especially the medieval borrowed vocabulary, the speed of the borrowing process, and the length of time the loans were used in written language. Perhaps this could even lead to new etymologies or to new perspectives on language contacts and life in medieval Eastern Scandinavia! Likewise related to Scandinavian languages is Kendra Willson’s (TIAS) study that examines the possibility of Finnish and Sami names and words appearing in Scandinavian runes, especially ones that we have not been able to decipher thus far. One tricky rune that Willson presented at the seminar reads ”MINVLESIÖMEPVRVANTA” that seems to include at least the words “to me” (minvle), and “eat” or “food” (siöme), and “porridge” (pvrv) in Finnish. It was a good brainteaser to have a guess at the meaning of this passage at the seminar.

Other researchers doing detective work similar to Willson are doctoral candidates Harri Uusitalo and Reko Tikka. Uusitalo from the Department of Finnish studies the Finnish translation from Swedish of a seventeenth-century land law document, the Aitolahti land law. Uusitalo will edit the document that is still in manuscript form and investigate its sources and its possible author based on for example handwriting and vocabulary. Two sources that are previous translations are already known, but there still are passages in the document that are from neither of these. One possible writer is Hartvig Speitz, who may have written the text while sitting a punishment in jail! Uusitalo also wishes to study the development of Finnish legal language. Tikka from the Department of Classics researches games of chance in ancient Rome and the early Middle Ages. Using written and archeological sources, he aims to find out what kinds of games of chance were played and what their significance and functions were to the players. For instance, their possible use in gambling is investigated. Tikka suspects the absence from many European languages of a verb denoting especially the play of children, that exists in Finnish and Swedish (‘leikkiä’, ‘leka’), may up to recent times have discouraged the study of games as a less dignified pursuit. This kind of research is to my mind great proof of how the knowledge of and research in languages can aid cultural and historical study. The dusty deserts of philology do not seem so barren after all.
Find out more about the historical linguistic research of each department on the UTU departmental websites under “Research and doctoral studies”.

Wishing everyone a creative, sunny, and relaxing summer!
On behalf of the seminar presenters,
Aino Haataja, MA, English

SLT historical linguistics seminar 13.5 – Winding through the dusty deserts of a lush philology, pt 1

Posted on June 9, 2016 by elmava

What games of chance did the ancient Romans play? What role did Latin have to play in fifteenth-century England? Can a portion of medieval street names in Turku be seen as loans from Baltic Sea region city plans, and to what degree do they draw their names from their context and functions, like a nearby market square? Could eighteenth-century runes in the Dalarna region in Sweden contain Finnish? What were the characteristics of a good book in the prologues of sixteenth-century English translated literature? Here are some examples of the questions discussed in the historical linguistics seminar of the UTU School of Languages and Translation Studies on May 13th 2016. We were many and the discussion was fruitful! Some key areas of research that were presented included multilingualism, paratextuality, historical onomastics, as well as vocabulary research and language contacts.

Multilingualism is a concept relevant to the research of Delia Schipor, Sara Norja, and Tuomo Fonsén. Schipor was visiting from the University of Stavanger, Norway, and her study focuses on the shift from Latin to English in documentary writing in late medieval England. She studies the interplay and relative proportions of English, Latin, and French in documentary texts, and explores the possible links between genre and code choice. This same shift into English, or the process of vernacularization (becoming native-like in language), but in scientific texts, is the object of Sara Norja’s doctoral study in the Department of English. She is making a digital edition of ten manuscript versions of an English alchemical text, The Mirror of Alchemy, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. She will examine the similarities and differences between the manuscripts, their transmission, and their relationship to European alchemical tradition. Tuomo Fonsén from the Department of German, on his part, studies multilingualism in pedagogical texts, that is in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pedagogical grammars of German in the kingdom of Sweden. These were bilingual, as Swedish was the medium of teaching German. He studies the writers, readers, and sources of these grammars, and the effects of a certain pedagogical approach on the linguistic philosophical stance of the grammars.

Paratextuality is a common denominator in the doctoral research of Sirkku Ruokkeinen and Aino Liira, both from the Department of English. Ruokkeinen studies the paratexts of sixteenth-century translated English literature aiming to find out how the work at hand is commented on, evaluated, and valued. She will use both theory on paratexts and the appraisal theory from discourse analysis as a basis for her work. Her study might even offer some answer to what constituted a good book to sixteenth-century Englishmen and –women! Aino Liira examines the communicative and text-organizing functions of paratexts in the translated version of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon. Her material consists of both manuscripts and early printed editions, and one of her goals is to see what impact the change in medium had on paratextual features.

To be continued
Text by Aino Haataja

Battle and Hastings

Posted on October 13, 2015 by elmava

My three-year research project on multilingual practices in England in the ‘long twelfth century’ ended in August, when its last research trip took me to the UK for the sixth time since 2012. In addition to doing library work, I paid a visit to the place where my long century began: Hastings, on the south coast, and the small town of Battle, which is just fifteen minutes from Hastings by train and, despite its fierce name, quite a sleepy place today. Hastings is a pleasant seaside town, a lively resort on a sunny Sunday afternoon in August but quiet and a little sad on a grey Monday morning.

All students of British history associate Hastings with the battle that won Duke William of Normandy the crown of England on 14th October, 1066. The fighting actually took place outside Hastings itself, at a site where a few years after his victory William the Conqueror built a monastery. The spot where England’s King Harold lost his life on that bloody day was where the high altar of the Battle Abbey church was located.

Over ten thousand men fought in the battle that changed the course of history in just one day. On a sunny summer’s day centuries later, this is quite hard to imagine, especially as the battlefield is now a meadow with grazing sheep, inside what is perhaps best described as a not particularly well looked-after park. The walk around the battlefield takes little more than half an hour, and although there are tourists pottering about, they are outnumbered by the sheep. The Abbey is now in ruins, but the site, run by English Heritage, is still interesting to visit. The village of Battle makes the most of the historic significance of the place; even one of the restaurants serves lunches that cost exactly £10.66.

The consequences of the battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest more broadly include social, political and cultural changes – and also linguistic ones, as French gained a new, prominent position in England. It was English lexis in particularly that was influenced by language contact; the previous sentence alone contains at least half a dozen words of French origin. As a historical linguist, I hope that the linguistic legacy of the Conquest is also remembered next year – the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings.

Text and photos by Janne Skaffari.

A Heat Wave of Digital Humanities

Posted on September 15, 2015 by elmava

It’s not summer for a doctoral student if it doesn’t include an intensive training week or two. We two intrepid travellers from the Department attended the sixth European Summer University in Digital Humanities (ESU DH), “Culture and Technology”, held at Universität Leipzig July 28-August 7.

Founded by Prof. Elisabeth Burr, ESU DH is a multilingual, multidisciplinary forum for young digital humanists of all stripes. The summer university offers a great number of workshops on topics ranging from programming languages and editorial principles to software tools. In addition to the two workshops taken by each participant, we were treated to a number of lectures and project presentations, poster sessions, panels and even two science slams. (Our workshop won the first one!) One of the most rewarding aspects of ESU DH was discussions with people hailing from various disciplines, united by our interest in the digital applications of humanities research.

We both attended the two-week workshop “Digital Editions and Editorial Theory: Historical Texts and Documents”. The first week, taught by Dr. Johanna Green (University of Glasgow), concentrated on (digital) editorial theory, using online editions of historical texts to highlight issues discussed. Both of our doctoral dissertations deal with historical texts in digital environments, so the workshop’s content had great practical value. Sara’s doctoral dissertation incorporates a digital edition of early English texts, while Sirkku’s involves a corpus of Renaissance paratexts. Both benefit from the instruction in editorial theory. Hence one of the highlights of the workshop was the theoretical discussion on different digital editions already published online, which gave insight into the options available for future work. The editions varied in presentation and style from The Dream of the Rood to Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts and The Chymistry of Isaac Newton.

The second week, taught by Kathryn Simpson (Edinburgh Napier University), was more hands-on, introducing us to the world of XML-encoded digital editing using material from the Livingstone Online Project. The project has collected a sizeable number of Livingstone’s field diaries, used spectral imaging technology to bring out the (often rather illegible) diary page, and is in the process of producing a digital edition. We got to participate in the project through transcribing pages from David Livingstone’s field diaries into XML using OXygen.

Livingstone, 1871 Field Diary, 297b/157-138 in color (left) and spectral ratio (right).
Image credit: Livingstone Online Project (CC).

Despite the full schedule, ESU DH managed to include a plethora of social events including coffees and communal dinners, as well as excursions to local museums and parks. The evening activities were slightly hampered by the heat, which climbed close to 40 degrees celsius (!) Thankfully the school itself was air conditioned. Since Leipzig celebrates its 1000th year as a city in 2015, there was too much to see to let the heat bother us. (Including a really rather convincing Elvis impersonator performing in a free open air concert on our final evening.) The highlight of the events for us was the visit to the Museum für Druckkunst, a printing history museum with a collection of several dozen printing presses, type foundries, and a number of historical print products, including their collection of incunabula.

All in all, the summer university was a fantastic experience and we both highly recommend it for anyone interested in, or doing research on, digital humanities.

Text: Sara Norja and Sirkku Ruokkeinen
Cover image credit: Maciej Eder (Uniwersytet Pedagogiczny, Kraków, Poland)

The Zoo

Posted on May 21, 2015 by elmava

An important part of academics’ work is attending conferences; think Presentation Skills meets Proseminar, or an MA Elective class, but with professors and researchers instead of students. While some of the best conferences are symposia with just a dozen or so papers, such as our own Linguistics Meets Book History last autumn, others are huge, with hundreds or thousands of participants. I went to a biggie in mid-May: the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

If you work on anything to do with the Middle Ages, the Kalamazoo congress will be on your bucket list. Affectionately known as The Zoo, it is an annual event organised by the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University. It is attended by 3000 medievalists each year, and this time the number of sessions was 567, each of them with three or more presentations, spread over three and a half days.

This was the first time I attended the congress, and I have to admit it was difficult to choose between so many intriguing-sounding parallel sessions. I tended to choose sessions which, one way or the other, focused on language; these were clearly in the minority as most of the speakers at The Zoo are historians rather than historical linguists. As much as you might learn from papers on topics that you are not that familiar with, it is often more useful to choose presentations which have some potential relevance for your own work. The clearly most linguistic session I attended was on polysemy in Old English, but I also went to three panels on translation, with papers on texts translated in the Middle Ages, translating medieval texts today, and on one occasion, not just rendering Chaucer in present-day language but also transmuting the Canterbury Tales into a comic book. One of my favourite sessions was a well-attended panel introducing some of the most ambitious projects for digitising medieval manuscripts; overall, Digital Humanities was quite prominent at the congress. My own paper on multilingual practices in post-Conquest England was in a less well-attended manuscripts session. As for the texts discussed at The Zoo, the English-language materials ranged from Beowulf to True Blood. For more on what went on at the congress, it is worth checking #kzoo2015 on Twitter.

Kalamazoo itself is the size of Joensuu and located a three-hour train ride from Chicago. My impression was that the town is known for three things: the Glenn Miller song from the 1940s, the range of local beers, and the university (might the last two be interconnected?). With 24,000 students, WMU is a good example of an American campus that is like a city within a city. The buildings are many, there are sports facilities and eateries, and in the middle there is a lovely green park complete with a pond (and swans). Many of the congress participants actually stayed on campus and slept in the dormitories. That part of the Kalamazoo experience I missed, as I stayed in a downtown hotel instead. Maybe next time?

Text and photos by Janne Skaffari

Turku #PoPsymp 2014: International symposium of linguistics and book history

Posted on November 13, 2014 by elmava

Linguistics met book history on 24–25 October 2014 as twenty-odd participants gathered in the Turku Main Library for an invigorating two days of presentations and discussion on the interaction of linguistic and material issues in the study of historical text. Linguistics Meets Book History: Seeking New Approaches (aka the PoP symposium), was organised by the Department’s Pragmatics on the Page (PoP) team in association with the Turku Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (TUCEMEMS).

We were treated to a number of stimulating presentations on topics such as code-switching, corpus studies, script-switching, otiose and ambiguous strokes, speech markers in manuscripts, layout and organisation of the page, genre markers, and reading practices. The majority of the contributors studied late medieval to early modern material, namely manuscripts and early books, letters, inscribed artefacts and various corpora.

The three keynote speakers demonstrated a variety of approaches to combining linguistics with historical and material context. Colette Moore (University of Washington) spoke on linguistic and scribal organisation in Middle English devotional texts. Her study focused on the use of visual and textual organisation in the interpretation of historical dialogues. Jukka Tyrkkö (University of Tampere) discussed multilingualism in early printed books, concluding that code-switching correlates with bibliographical features such as format. Daniel Wakelin (University of Oxford) delivered a paper on the communicative aspects of page-framing and the patterns of ruling.

Personal highlights for the writers included, for example, Anya Adair’s presentation on ambiguous (rather than otiose) strokes in late medieval scripts; Maura Ratia’s presentation on textual labels signalling genre, text type and/or discourse form; and Daniel Wakelin’s keynote on aesthetic functions and implications of e.g. prestige carried by such practical elements as page ruling.

The symposium concluded in a round-table discussion on the re-introduction of philology as a terminological starting point to studies of linguistics and book history, tactics for editing historical texts, and the usefulness of collaboration between people working on different time periods. The participants unanimously agreed that the symposium had been fruitful and everyone sounded excited about the idea of #PoPsymp2.0.

Scholars relaxing after a long day. The evening programme included a guided tour to the Aboa Vetus exhibition Letter by Letter: Traces of Reading and Writing.

Text and photos: Aino Liira, Sara Norja and Sirkku Ruokkeinen

How languages are learnt

Posted on September 22, 2014 by elmava

It’s Christmas in September for anyone interested in language learning and teaching! A few years ago, the Department of English was actively involved in a popular course Language Teaching and Learning, which was a team-taught course for language and education majors. We are happy to announce that the contents of this course have now been published as an up-to-date book textbook. This is a textbook in Finnish with a target audience of teachers, students considering a teaching career and anyone generally interested in language learning and teaching.

The new book Kuinka kieltä opitaan: opas vieraan kielen opettajalle ja opiskelijalle (published by Gaudeamus) was edited by Päivi Pietilä and Pekka Lintunen. The authors come from the University of Turku and Helsinki and represent didactics and different language departments.

The chapters discuss the nature of language skills, learners’ individual differences, theories of language learning and methods of language teaching. There are separate chapters on the teaching and learning of grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation of a foreign language. The book also includes a chapter on the role of culture in language teaching and, as a final chapter, an introduction to language assessment.

Turku University and the Department of English have always been active in teacher education and language learning research. Nowadays researchers are also encouraged to publish in Finnish and with a wide target audience in mind. After all, societal interaction is, in addition to research and teaching, a key function of a Finnish university. The new publication is a way to distribute the latest theories and research findings in a reader-friendly format.

The book includes reflective tasks after each chapter to help the readers in their own learning process and a lengthy list of references for the more research-oriented readers. And if September is too early for you, you can always add the book into your Christmas wish list.

Text by Pekka Lintunen
Editors’ photo by Outi Kitti/Gaudeamus.
The book’s co-editors, Pekka Lintunen and Päivi Pietilä.

Festschrifts and academic festivities

Posted on June 27, 2014 by elmava

One catch-phrase nowadays is that universities are dynamic. Indeed, there are many changes going on during each academic year. But there are also traditions that are valued by the academic community. For instance, the academic year has the opening ceremony in September and the graduation ceremony, publiikki, in June where new MAs are celebrated. In addition, professors give inaugural lectures when they are appointed. They also give a valedictory address when they retire as we have seen this spring with our Professor Risto Hiltunen (see earlier post)  .

Another academic tradition that the English department is following this year is that of a Festschrift. Festschrifts are commonly collections of articles published to honour a professor’s (or another academic’s) birthday or retirement. You can often recognise these when the name of a book says, for example, “essays in honour of”. When Festschrifts are published as books, they usually contain articles by the closest colleagues, collaborators and former doctoral students of the honouree. It is also common that the books are thematic and related to the honouree’s research interests. They may also include a biographical note and a tabula gratulatoria, which is a list of academic friends and colleagues who wish to congratulate the honouree. 

 A large part of universities’ funding is based on the publications we produce. After all, university teaching is based on research, and professors and lecturers are also active researchers. For funding reasons, it is better to publish articles in refereed journals. This means that many Festschrifts have also changed into a different format. Journals and publishers sometimes allow Festschrifts to be published in their series.

This year, we have the pleasure to publish another Festschrift, this time to honour Professor Päivi Pietilä. The theme is language learning, which is approached from many perspectives in the ten articles in the collection. The collection is a special issue in the AFinLA-e publication series and available for free here. Importantly, the Festschrift is a surprise gift to the honouree, so if you sense an air of secrecy and whispers along the corridors, chances are there is a Festschrift in the works. This time, the secret was luckily preserved until the end; to celebrate Päivi’s milestone in life, the editors gave her the manuscript as a bound golden thesis. With this publication, we want to congratulate Päivi and offer those interested in language learning many inspiring new studies to read.

The editors of the journal special issue, Pekka Lintunen, Maija S. Peltola & Mari-Liisa Varila with Professor Päivi Pietilä, the Festschrift honouree.

Text: Pekka Lintunen
Photo: Janne Skaffari

Mixing and Switching

Posted on January 7, 2014 by elmava

”Etkö voisi please auttaa tässä?”
”And then she was like, no ei se mitään.”

As language users – speakers, writers, listeners, readers – we are constantly surrounded by linguistic data, and some of the material we observe is bi- or multilingual. The examples above may not be authentic (as in ‘cited from a corpus of genuine conversation’), but they are certainly realistic (as in ‘I think I have heard something like this before, and not just once’). They exemplify code-switching, the use or two languages, dialects, language varieties or, more briefly, codes in a single communicative situation. People who know two or more languages are prone to code-switch on occasion.

The English Department offered a team-taught optional course on code-switching in the second half of the autumn semester, a unique enterprise bringing together eight teachers and researchers from the five tracks of the department. This ensured that the students were offered multiple viewpoints and approaches, ranging from written code-switching in medieval materials to multilingual practices in the EU to translations of postcolonial literature. One of the surprises offered in the lectures was that the use of students’ first language alongside their second or foreign language in the classroom also counts as code-switching, and that there are language classes in the world where the use of the first language is strictly forbidden – a feature not easily grasped by those who have learned English and other languages at Finnish schools.

The course was well received by the nearly forty students who attended the lecture series. The participants were asked to write a variety of short texts about code-switching during the course and also to report on their own multilingual communication and the language-mixing they observed around them. Many said that they had not realized until this semester that code-switching was so frequent and had so many functions, and that it was such a huge issue that the six weeks of teaching were not nearly enough for a thorough survey. Indeed, several students have already chosen code-switching topics for their BA projects to be able to carry on with koodinvaihto research.

Janne Skaffari

EnglanTY

What the dickens is happening at the Department of English, Turku University

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