14th Trends in Classics - Description

Department of Classics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Departamento de Filología Clásica, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Dipartimento di Antichità, Filosofia e Storia, Università degli Studi di Genova

Center for the Greek Language (Thessaloniki)

Fundación Pastor de Estudios Clásicos (Madrid) 

14th Trends in Classics International Conference

“Historical Linguistics and Classical Philology” 

Thessaloniki, 5-7 March 2021 (ONLINE)

Conference description:

It has been argued that historical linguistics is the child of classical philology, yet the borders of the two disciplines have not always been so clearly defined or delineated, while their history testifies to a turbulent coexistence, sometimes demonstrating a cross-fertilizing collaboration and at other times taking centrifugal paths, but always moving along a ‘love-and-hate’ course. This kind of relation is best reflected in the 19th-century shift in the pronouncements by two of the most prominent protagonists of this association, Georg Curtius and Karl Brugmann, teacher and student respectively, with the symbolic reversal of the order of the two disciplines in the respective titles from “Philologie und Sprachwissenschaft” (1862) to “Sprachwissenschaft und Philologie” (1885).

The debate is long-standing and well alive today. The conference revisits this relation aspiring to address its various aspects and ramifications, investigate the wide range of applications of the linguistic method in the philological analysis of classical texts, as well as explore new venues of the contacts between the two disciplines and try to further this collaboration into areas mutually beneficial to both fields. In this spirit, the participants are asked to contribute studies showing new results that can be reached and that open new perspectives in the present-day research using the tools and methods of historical linguistics applied to the temporal span, the geographical area and the languages that are of interest to today’s classical philology understood in a broad sense as the knowledge of classical antiquity. 

Thematic areas:

Among the thematic areas to be addressed are the following: 

• Linguistic theory and the study of classical texts
• Dialectology
• Lexicography and etymology
• Comparison between Ancient Greek and Latin
• Textual criticism and editorial practices of ancient texts
• Sociolinguistic approaches to the study of classical texts
• Linguistic argumentation and reasoning
• Corpus linguistics
• Digital processing of natural language and classical languages
• The contribution of other disciplines to the study of classical texts (archaeology, writing, history, mythology, etc.)

Sponsors:

Aristotle University Research Committee

Center for the Creek Language

Social and Cultural Affairs Welfare Foundation (KIKPE)