Claire Louise Bowern | |
---|---|
Occupation | Linguist |
Known for | Computational phylogenetic classification of the Pama-Nyungan language family |
Title | Professor |
Awards | Kenneth L. Hale Award |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | |
Thesis | Bardi Verb Morphology in Historical Perspective (2004) |
Doctoral advisor | Jay Jasanoff, Calvert Watkins |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Linguistics |
Sub-discipline | Australian Aboriginal languages, historical linguistics, language documentation |
Institutions | |
Website | Yale University webpage |
Claire Louise Bowern (/ˈboʊərn/) is a linguist who works with Australian Indigenous languages.[1] She is currently a professor of linguistics at Yale University, and has a secondary appointment in the department of anthropology at Yale.[2]
YouTube Encyclopedic
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Where did English come from? - Claire Bowern
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Voynich Manuscript w/ Lisa Fagin Davis, Raymond Clemens, Claire Bowern Mondays at Beinecke 7/12/21
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The Voynich Manuscript with Lisa Fagin Davis
Transcription
When we talk about English, we often think of it as a single language but what do the dialects spoken in dozens of countries around the world have in common with each other, or with the writings of Chaucer? And how are any of them related to the strange words in Beowulf? The answer is that like most languages, English has evolved through generations of speakers, undergoing major changes over time. By undoing these changes, we can trace the language from the present day back to its ancient roots. While modern English shares many similar words with Latin-derived romance languages, like French and Spanish, most of those words were not originally part of it. Instead, they started coming into the language with the Norman invasion of England in 1066. When the French-speaking Normans conquered England and became its ruling class, they brought their speech with them, adding a massive amount of French and Latin vocabulary to the English language previously spoken there. Today, we call that language Old English. This is the language of Beowulf. It probably doesn't look very familiar, but it might be more recognizable if you know some German. That's because Old English belongs to the Germanic language family, first brought to the British Isles in the 5th and 6th centuries by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. The Germanic dialects they spoke would become known as Anglo-Saxon. Viking invaders in the 8th to 11th centuries added more borrowings from Old Norse into the mix. It may be hard to see the roots of modern English underneath all the words borrowed from French, Latin, Old Norse and other languages. But comparative linguistics can help us by focusing on grammatical structure, patterns of sound changes, and certain core vocabulary. For example, after the 6th century, German words starting with "p," systematically shifted to a "pf" sound while their Old English counterparts kept the "p" unchanged. In another split, words that have "sk" sounds in Swedish developed an "sh" sound in English. There are still some English words with "sk," like "skirt," and "skull," but they're direct borrowings from Old Norse that came after the "sk" to "sh" shift. These examples show us that just as the various Romance languages descended from Latin, English, Swedish, German, and many other languages descended from their own common ancestor known as Proto-Germanic spoken around 500 B.C.E. Because this historical language was never written down, we can only reconstruct it by comparing its descendants, which is possible thanks to the consistency of the changes. We can even use the same process to go back one step further, and trace the origins of Proto-Germanic to a language called Proto-Indo-European, spoken about 6000 years ago on the Pontic steppe in modern day Ukraine and Russia. This is the reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European family that includes nearly all languages historically spoken in Europe, as well as large parts of Southern and Western Asia. And though it requires a bit more work, we can find the same systematic similarities, or correspondences, between related words in different Indo-European branches. Comparing English with Latin, we see that English has "t" where Latin has "d", and "f" where latin has "p" at the start of words. Some of English's more distant relatives include Hindi, Persian and the Celtic languages it displaced in what is now Britain. Proto-Indo-European itself descended from an even more ancient language, but unfortunately, this is as far back as historical and archeological evidence will allow us to go. Many mysteries remain just out of reach, such as whether there might be a link between Indo-European and other major language families, and the nature of the languages spoken in Europe prior to its arrival. But the amazing fact remains that nearly 3 billion people around the world, many of whom cannot understand each other, are nevertheless speaking the same words shaped by 6000 years of history.
Career
Bowern received her PhD from Harvard University in 2004, under the advisement of Jay Jasanoff and Calvert Watkins. Her dissertation was about Bardi, a Nyulnyulan language, and its verbal morphology, both diachronically and synchronically.[3] In 2007, the NSF/NEH awarded her a grant to study Bardi texts from the 1920s.[4] The thesis also included a sketch grammar of Bardi, as well as the first attempted reconstruction of Proto-Nyulnyulan.[5]
She is the author of two widely used linguistics textbooks, Linguistic Fieldwork: A Practical Guide[6] and An Introduction to Historical Linguistics.
Chirila
At Yale, Bowern founded the Contemporary and Historical Reconstruction in the Indigenous Languages of Australia database (Chirila), through the Yale Pama-Nyungan Lab.[7][8] The name for the database was inspired by both the motivations of the project and the word for "echidna" in many Western Desert languages, tyirilya. Bowern's interest in the historical linguistics of Australian languages has directed the lab to collect lexical data for a more thorough accounting of the composition of the Pama-Nyungan language family.
Service
Since 2015 she has been the vice president of the Endangered Language Fund.[9][10]
As of March 2022[update] Bowern is on the editorial review board for the following publications:
- Language Dynamics and Change (editorial board)[11]
- Diachronica (executive editor)[12]
- Transactions of the Philological Society (editorial board)[13]
- Routledge Studies in Historical Linguistics (series editor)[14]
- EL Publishing (advisory board)[15]
- Conceptual Foundations of Language Science (editorial board)[16]
Bowern was previously an associate editor of Language, specifically responsible for the historical linguistics and language documentation areas from 2012 to 2016.
Awards and honors
The Kenneth L. Hale Award was awarded to her in 2014, for her documentation work on Bardi.[17]
In 2020, Bowern was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.[18]
In 2023, Bowern was elected a new member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[19]
Key publications
- (2018) Bowern, Clare., Bouckaert, R.R., & Atkinson, Q.D. The origin and expansion of Pama–Nyungan languages across Australia. Nat Ecol Evol 2, 741–749 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0489-3
- (2014) Bowern, Claire and Bethwyn Evans (eds). Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Basingstoke: Routledge.
- (2012) Bowern, Claire. A Grammar of Bardi. Mouton de Gruyter.
- (2011) Bowern, Claire. Sivisa Titan: Sketch Grammar, Texts, Vocabulary Based on Material Collected by P. Josef Meier and Po Minis. University of Hawaii Press.
- (2010) Bowern, Claire and Terry Crowley. An Introduction to Historical Linguistics. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Fourth edition.
- (2008) Bowern, Claire. Linguistic Fieldwork: A practical guide. Palgrave. (Online Materials) (2nd Edition 2015)
- (2004) Bowern, Claire and Harold Koch (eds). Australian Languages: Classification and the Comparative Method. Benjamins
References
- ^ "Claire Bowern - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
- ^ "Claire Bowern | Department of Anthropology". anthropology.yale.edu. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
- ^ "Harvard Linguistics Alumni, 2000s". Retrieved 8 March 2018.
- ^ "Claire Bowern – Professor, Yale Linguistics". campuspress.yale.edu. Retrieved 19 November 2017.
- ^ Bowern, Claire (2004). Bardi verb morphology in historical perspective (PDF). Retrieved 12 March 2022.
- ^ Rogers, Chris; Campbell, Lyle (2008). "Review of Linguistic Fieldwork: A Practical Guide". Anthropological Linguistics. 50 (3/4): 393–397. JSTOR 20639012.
- ^ "About the Chirila database". Yale Pama-Nyungan Lab. 13 January 2016. Retrieved 12 March 2022.
- ^ Bowern, Claire (2016). "Chirila: contemporary and historical resources for the indigenous languages of Australia" (PDF). Language Documentation & Conservation. 10: 1–45. Retrieved 11 March 2022.
- ^ "Endangered Language Fund". Archived from the original on 23 January 2015. Retrieved 22 January 2015.
- ^ "Claire Bowern elected vice president of the Endangered Language Fund | Linguistics". ling.yale.edu. 23 January 2015. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
- ^ "Language Dynamics and Change (editorial board)". Language Dynamics and Change. Retrieved 11 March 2022.
- ^ "Diachronica". International Journal for Historical Linguistics. Retrieved 11 March 2022.
- ^ "Transactions of the Philological Society (editorial board)". Transactions of the Philological Society. Retrieved 11 March 2022.
- ^ "Routledge Studies in Historical Linguistics". Routledge Studies in Historical Linguistics. Retrieved 11 March 2022.
- ^ "EL Publishing". Editors and Advisory Board. Retrieved 11 March 2022.
- ^ "Conceptual Foundations of Language Science". Conceptual Foundations of Language Science. Retrieved 11 March 2022.
- ^ "Previous holders of the Kenneth L. Hale Award". Linguistic Society of America. Retrieved 11 March 2022.
- ^ "Linguistic Society of America List of Fellows by Year". Retrieved 11 March 2022.
- ^ "Nine Yale scholars elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences".
External links
- Yale faculty profile
- Curriculum vitae (2018)
- Claire Bowern at The Conversation profile
- LSA Member spotlight
- CHIRILA (Contemporary and Historical Reconstruction in the Indigenous Languages of Australia) at Yale
- Claire Bowern publications indexed by Google Scholar