[Histling-l] Summary: Historical Linguistics courses

[Joe Salmons]

Thanks for the almost three dozen (!) responses to my query, often with followups — from Canada, the UK, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the Basque Country/Spain, Austria, Iceland, and the US. (I won’t even try to thank everybody by name for fear of missing too many people, and hoping I didn’t miss whole countries.) Responses came from mostly larger programs and departments, but with a strikingly wide range of orientations, theoretically and empirically. Moreover, responses came from Linguistics Depts per se but also from various language departments, where of course a lot of historical linguistics lives. 

Keeping in mind that this went specifically to a list for historical linguists, the responses naturally indicate the presence of at least basic courses on the topic, often required courses and often with a sequence of two … introduction and advanced, basically. A good number of people indicated that beyond that the offerings were taught under a ‘topics’ rubric. Of course in addition to histories of languages taught in language departments, there are historical offerings in Linguistics Depts/Programs aimed at particular families, often Indo-European or branches of it (Vienna, Zurich, UCLA — the last across subfields, as listed below).

I had asked specifically about specialized regular course offerings. (Part of my motivation is that we’re working on our Linguistics graduate program here at Wisconsin and I am wondering about whether it’s better to be minimalist and use topics courses and seminars or to build a set of specific courses.) At any rate, there are a lot of specialized courses, it looks like. Here are examples:

-Historical syntax (Manchester, University of Iceland, Oregon, UCLA)
-Historical phonology / sound change (Munich, Edinburgh, UCLA, Ohio State, University of Iceland)
-Historical morphology (Ohio State, UCLA, University of Iceland)

Other offerings include areas like these:

-Phylogenetics (Yale, coming at UCLA)
-Historical Pragmatics (English, Köln)
-Grammaticalization (Antwerp)
-Semantic change (Antwerp, Ohio State)

At Utah, there’s a historical course for Business students, if you need inspiration to think about new perspectives!

Again, this is far from exhaustive, even with this little set of answers. Like Brian pointed out, it’s useful for us to think about the position and profile we have in departments and programs. I don’t know if there’s any value in doing anything more structured here, but the info will certainly be helpful as we build things at Wisconsin.

Thanks again for the help.
Joe