Languages show variations according to the social class of speakers and Latin was no exception, as readers of Petronius are aware. The Romance languages have traditionally been regarded as developing ...out of a 'language of the common people' (Vulgar Latin), but studies of modern languages demonstrate that linguistic change does not merely come, in the social sense, 'from below'. There is change from above, as prestige usages work their way down the social scale, and change may also occur across the social classes. This book is a history of many of the developments undergone by the Latin language as it changed into Romance, demonstrating the varying social levels at which change was initiated. About thirty topics are dealt with, many of them more systematically than ever before. Discussions often start in the early Republic with Plautus, and the book is as much about the literary language as about informal varieties.
Latin Leonhardt, Jürgen; Kronenberg, Kenneth
2013, 2013-11-05, 2013-11-12
eBook
The mother tongue of the Roman Empire and the lingua franca of the West for centuries afterward, Latin survives today primarily in classrooms and texts. Yet this "dead language" is unique in the ...influence it has exerted across centuries and continents. Jürgen Leonhardt offers the story of the first "world language", from antiquity to the present.
This fascinating history explores the dynamic relationship between overseas colonisation and the bodily experience of eating. It reveals the importance of food to the colonial project in Spanish ...America and reconceptualises the role of European colonial expansion in shaping the emergence of ideas of race during the Age of Discovery. Rebecca Earle shows that anxieties about food were fundamental to Spanish understandings of the new environment they inhabited and their interactions with the native populations of the New World. Settlers wondered whether Europeans could eat New World food, whether Indians could eat European food and what would happen to each if they did. By taking seriously their ideas about food we gain a richer understanding of how settlers understood the physical experience of colonialism and of how they thought about one of the central features of the colonial project. The result is simultaneously a history of food, colonialism and race.
At the turn of the twentieth century, a concatenation of diverse social movements arose unexpectedly in Latin America, culminating in massive anti-free market demonstrations. These events ushered in ...governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela that advocated socialization and planning, challenging the consensus over neoliberal hegemony and the weakness of movements to oppose it. Eduardo Silva offers the first comprehensive comparative account of these extraordinary events, arguing that the shift was influenced by favorable political associational space, a reformist orientation to demands, economic crisis, and mechanisms that facilitated horizontal linkages among a wide variety of social movement organizations. His analysis applies Karl Polanyi's theory of the double movement of market society to these events, predicting the dawning of an era more supportive of government intervention in the economy and society.
Despite constitutions that enshrine equality, until recently every state in Latin America permitted longer working hours (in some cases more than double the hours) and lower benefits for domestic ...workers than other workers. This has, in effect, subsidized a cheap labor force for middle- and upper-class families and enabled well-to-do women to enter professional labor markets without having to negotiate household and care work with their male partners. While elite resistance to reform has been widespread, during the past fifteen years a handful of countries have instituted equal rights. In Care Work and Class, Merike Blofield examines how domestic workers’ mobilization, strategic alliances, and political windows of opportunity, mostly linked to left-wing executive and legislative allies, can lead to improved rights even in a region as unequal as Latin America. Blofield also examines the conditions that lead to better enforcement of rights.
Political scientists have worried about declining levels of citizens' support for their regimes (legitimacy), but have failed to empirically link this decline to the survival or breakdown of ...democracy. This apparent paradox is the 'legitimacy puzzle', which this book addresses by examining political legitimacy's structure, sources, and effects. With exhaustive empirical analysis of high-quality survey data from eight Latin American nations, it confirms that legitimacy exists as multiple, distinct dimensions. It finds that one's position in society, education, knowledge, information, and experiences shape legitimacy norms. Contrary to expectations, however, citizens who are unhappy with their government's performance do not drop out of politics or resort mainly to destabilizing protest. Rather, the disaffected citizens of these Latin American democracies participate at high rates in conventional politics and in such alternative arenas as communal improvement and civil society. And despite regime performance problems, citizen support for democracy remains high.
In this comparative-historical analysis of Spanish America, Mahoney offers a new theory of colonialism and postcolonial development. He explores why certain kinds of societies are subject to certain ...kinds of colonialism and why these forms of colonialism give rise to countries with differing levels of economic prosperity and social well-being. Mahoney contends that differences in the extent of colonialism are best explained by the potentially evolving fit between the institutions of the colonizing nation and those of the colonized society. Moreover, he shows how institutions forged under colonialism bring countries to relative levels of development that may prove remarkably enduring in the postcolonial period. The argument is sure to stir discussion and debate, both among experts on Spanish America who believe that development is not tightly bound by the colonial past, and among scholars of colonialism who suggest that the institutional identity of the colonizing nation is of little consequence.
Systems of social protection can provide crucial assistance to the poorest and most vulnerable groups in society, but not all systems are created equally. In Latin America, social policies have ...historically exhibited large gaps in coverage and high levels of inequality in benefit size. Since the late 1990s, countries in this region have begun to grapple with these challenges, enacting a series of reforms to healthcare, social assistance and education policy. While some of these initiatives have moved in a universal direction, others have maintained existing segmentation or moved in a regressive direction. Welfare and Party Politics in Latin America explores this variation in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Venezuela, finding that the design of previous policies, the intensity of electoral competition, and the character of political parties all influence the nature of contemporary social policy reform in Latin America.
Since the 1980s, bilingualism has become one of the main themes of sociolinguistics - but there are as yet few large-scale treatments of the subject specific to the ancient world. This book is the ...first work to deal systematically with bilingualism during a period of antiquity (the Roman period, down to about the fourth century AD) in the light of sociolinguistic discussions of bilingual issues. The general theme of the work is the nature of the contact between Latin and numerous other languages spoken in the Roman world. Among the many issues discussed three are prominent: code-switching (the practice of switching between two languages in the course of a single utterance) and its motivation, language contact as a cause of change in one or both of the languages in contact, and the part played by language choice and language switching in the establishment of personal and group identities.
An unstructured genre that blends high aesthetic standards with nonfiction commentary, the journalistic crónica, or chronicle, has played a vital role in Latin American urban life since the ...nineteenth century. Drawing on extensive archival research, Viviane Mahieux delivers new testimony on how chroniclers engaged with modernity in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo during the 1920s and 1930s, a time when avant-garde movements transformed writers' and readers' conceptions of literature. Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America: The Shared Intimacy of Everyday Life examines the work of extraordinary raconteurs Salvador Novo, Cube Bonifant, Roberto Arlt, Alfonsina Storni, and Mário de Andrade, restoring the original newspaper contexts in which their articles first emerged. Each of these writers guided their readers through a constantly changing cityscape and advised them on matters of cultural taste, using their ties to journalism and their participation in urban practice to share accessible wisdom and establish their role as intellectual arbiters. The intimate ties they developed with their audience fostered a permeable concept of literature that would pave the way for overtly politically engaged chroniclers of the 1960s and 1970s. Providing comparative analysis as well as reflection on the evolution of this important genre, Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America is the first systematic study of the Latin American writers who forged a new reading public in the early twentieth century.
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