On Thursday, November 4th at 6:30 PM EST, the Department of Comparative Literature will host Loanwords in an Age of Grammar with Tamara Chin!
Loanwords in an Age of Grammar
Recent scholarship on the reception of antiquity emphasizes the modern partitioning of the past into distinct civilizations, nations, and languages. This talk comes from an effort to trace out alternate traditions that pursued premodern connection across a range of disciplines (ca. 1870-ca. 1970). In the talk, Tamara Chin will focus on philology and the attention paid to loanwords within a broader soundscape of contact that included rhythm, tone, and pronunciation. In Europe and Asia, ancient loanwords acquired modern significance not only in linguistics (classification; phonology) but also in other domains (historiography; colonial and anticolonial politics).
Tamara Chin is an associate professor of comparative literature at Brown University. Author of Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination, she is completing a book on the modern study of ancient contact (ca. 1870-ca. 1970), entitled The Silk Road Idea.
*This in-person event is open to current NYU faculty, students, and staff only. Attendees must RSVP here for the location.*