Some talks from Formulaic Language in Historical Linguistics

Since last April, I’ve been working part-time on the AlUla Inscriptions Corpus Analysis Project (AICAP) at Ghent University. The researchers are spread out over four different countries, but this week, we all converged on Helsinki, Finland, to take part in a workshop on formulaic language—a major feature of the North Arabian corpora we’re working on.

To my slight disappointment, most of the presenters seemed to be asking very different questions than the kind I normally associate with historical linguistics. Was it just me?

https://bsky.app/profile/bnuyaminim.bsky.social/post/3lqop6jn5ik2g

While most of the replies went for my preferred answer A, there were a few B’s too. Since my followers probably skew towards agreeing with me, that supports the possibility that a large chunk of scholars use “historical linguistics” to mean “linguistics but on texts from history times”. Which is fine! Maybe we should start using a different term for A, as done here by the Venerable Bate.

https://bsky.app/profile/dannybate.bsky.social/post/3lqormvmcjs2m

Regardless of terminology, it’s the type A research that I tend to be most interested in. So I’d like to highlight the couple of talks that did focus on those kinds of diachronic questions, together with a few others.

On Monday, Francesca Schironi talked about how Hipparchus (2nd c. BCE) used formulaic language to present a bunch of astronomical data in a way that makes it easier for the reader to navigate. Where later authors put data in tables, Hipparchus has set formulas to let you know what star in what constellation he’s talking about, what star culminates at its rising and setting, and so forth.

Jorge Alejandro Wong Medina talked about the use of different Greek dialects in the Homeric epics. Wong showed that some forms with Aeolic features, like néessi ‘ships (dat.)’, could only have been created by speakers of an Ionic dialect. This shows that they are not retentions from a hypothesised “Aeolic phase” of the epic tradition, but were artificially created to fit the metre.

On Tuesday, I got to chair our project’s panel, not having anything of my own to present yet. Although these talks were nearly the only ones that were fully about non-European languages, it was good to see them attract a very sizeable audience (other outliers included Riccardo Ginevra, Erica Biagetti et al. on Homeric Greek and Vedic Sanskrit and a talk by Daniele Di Pasquale on Old Korean that I missed).

Jérôme Norris introduced the various pre-Islamic epigraphic corpora of Northern Arabia and talked about how they used different formulas. While some are limited to just one writing tradition (like Nabataean šlm ‘may he be well’), others occur in different corpora and may have been borrowed or inherited between scripts/languages.

Julia Maczuga investigated the origins of the formulas seen in Early Islamic inscriptions from the region. While many are new (and usually explicitly Islamic in meaning), there’s also a large set of formulas that show continuity with pre-Islamic corpora. Some of these have even wider-ranging connections, being used in non-Arabian languages like Greek too.

Fokelien Kootstra-Ford, the project’s PI, presented some of her work on Dadanitic, where formula usage is just one way in which the corpus shows considerable variety. AICAP’s fieldwork has also turned up a previously unknown formula, attested in inscriptions at one site only, prompting a discussion of what it might mean and how we can figure that out in the first place.

(I’ve got some nice pictures of these presentations but I haven’t asked the speakers for permission to use them. Maybe they’ll appear on the project’s Instagram page at some point.)

Finally, I also enjoyed Samuel Peter Cook‘s talk on Greek calquing in Coptic legal texts. The two main examples he discussed were e-u ōrej ‘as a security’ which accurately follows the semantics, not the form of the equivalent Greek pròs aspháleian, and the first person singular performative e-i-sōtm, a finite verb, which Cook argues started out as a non-finite circumstantial present calquing Greek participles.